Date: Fri, 10 Oct 2025 20:25:39 +0000 From: Martin <iio7@protonmail.com> To: "freebsd-questions@freebsd.org" <freebsd-questions@freebsd.org> Subject: About the upcoming changes to pkgbase Message-ID: <jRGVZY419OAIyqYXw9JLpXYYqsqCbChnrhZcd-QwSpw8_2qzJSphpZB0eErMqZOR5EAf3r6nTvC9YXWXprdebznqHT7-MudNSFQU8JJQPp8=@protonmail.com>
next in thread | raw e-mail | index | archive | help
Regarding the upcoming change from freebsd-update to pkgbase, I have two questions which I haven't been able to find a clear answer to, or perhaps I have overlooked something. In the documentation[1] it says that pkgbase will replace tarball distribution sets, such as base.txz or kernel.txz. This almost made me cry because it's so easy to manually download those tarballs and upgrade the system manually without using freebsd-update. I don't care about freebsd-update going away, but being able to simply download those tarballs was gold! Does this mean that this option is not possible any longer? It also seems that pkgbase is going to ruin one of the most loved features of FreeBSD, the clean separation between the base system and the third party packages? Even though the pkgbase is going to reside on a separate repository, which needs it own setup in pkg.conf, this is AFAIK not the same clean separation. Doing a "pkg WHATEVER" now always has the potential to either mess up the base system or the third party packages. Like the documentation says, "This step might remove non-base packages, which could include the running desktop environment. Be careful." This does actually happen from time to time, pkg is removing installed packages during an upgrade which it shouldn't remove and you have to reinstall those packages manually afterwards. In the past, no matter what you did with the packages, your base system would always be unaffected, now this doesn't seem to be like that after this change. I cannot help vent a bit of frustration, but it feels so much like FreeBSD has been going in the direction of "datacenter Linux" for the last X number of years, not only package management related, but also CI and other areas as well and a push in that direction is perhaps coming from people in the FreeBSD project being associated with Big Tech? Wanting FreeBSD to become a major player on those platforms, I don't know. At our company we use both Linux and FreeBSD as in the right tool for the job and we have been for many years. We use FreeBSD for several reasons, ZFS being a first class citizen is definitely one of them, jails is another, but the clean separation of the base system from packages is perhaps the MAIN reason because that gives a so much better way to handle system administration. I can certainly understand having more companies and more people use FreeBSD is better, BUT the more FreeBSD becomes like a Linux distro, the less reason there is to actually use it. [1] https://docs.freebsd.org/en/books/handbook/book/#pkgbase Kind regards, Martin
Want to link to this message? Use this URL: <https://mail-archive.FreeBSD.org/cgi/mid.cgi?jRGVZY419OAIyqYXw9JLpXYYqsqCbChnrhZcd-QwSpw8_2qzJSphpZB0eErMqZOR5EAf3r6nTvC9YXWXprdebznqHT7-MudNSFQU8JJQPp8=>