Time to bid farewell to the old pkg_ tools

[FreeBSD Ports Management Team Secretary]

There comes a time in the life cycle of just about every software package
that it has bee re-evaluated, refreshed, deprecated or just retired.

It is time that we bid farewell to the old pkg_* software that has been
part of FreeBSD since the beginning, and has served us well.  After years
of development, testing, and playing, pkg(8) has become a suitable
replacement.

Pkg is the Next Generation package management tool for FreeBSD.  It is the
replacement for the current pkg_info/pkg_create/pkg_add tools that ports
use to register local packages and which provide remote packages.  Its main
goals are to facilitate remote binary package upgrades.  It also works with
ports without remote binary packages.

Pkg, combined with the quarterly release package sets, enables easy
installation and safe upgrades for binary packages.  Signed, binary
packages are available for all supported FreeBSD releases on the i386 and
amd64 platforms from pkg.freebsd.org.  Additionally, for those compiling
ports from source, pkg's new database format gives more fine-grained
querying and management of installed software.

New features on the drawing board, like automatic pkg-plist generation,
sub-packages, creating multiple packages containing different parts of a
port from one build process, and flavours, being able to ask for e.g. a
webserver, without directly specifying a specific one, cannot be
implemented in the old pkg_* tools and those plans are currently on hold.

You are not obligated to switch to binary packages, if you still prefer to
compile your own ports, it is a simple matter of installing ports-mgmt/pkg,
run pkg2ng, add WITH_PKGNG=yes to your make.conf and use pkg <action>
instead of pkg_<action>.

You can read more about pkgng on the FreeBSD wiki,
https://wiki.freebsd.org/pkgng.

The decision has been made to allow the old pkg_* software to be EoL'd 6
months from now, at September 1, 2014 in all active FreeBSD branches.

Please start testing pkg(8) in your test environments before taking it
live, you will find the benefits of full binary updates for your ports to
be beneficial in a very short amount of time.  Even if you prefer to
compile from source, you will still reap the benefits of the modern
packaging system.

http://blogs.freebsdish.org/portmgr/2014/02/03/time-to-bid-farewell-to-the-old-pkg_-tools/