On Mar 19, 2026, at 12:40 pm, Miroslav Lachman <[email protected]> wrote:
> On 19/03/2026 14:42, Paul Mather wrote: >> On Mar 19, 2026, at 7:29 am, Miroslav Lachman <[email protected]> wrote: > > [...] > >>> First and most important (at least for me) would be a clear separation of >>> base system upgrades from 3rd packages, without having to enter >>> 40-character-long arguments. >> The "pkg" command allows you to define aliases in pkg.conf. So, if you >> wanted to save on typing, you could, say, define "base-upgrade" and >> "ports-upgrade" aliases to restrict "pkg upgrade" to just the appropriate >> repositories. > > Yes, and everyone will fix it locally, each in their own way, so every > computer will have a different command to achieve the same result. What an > amazing time we live in. \begin{sarcasm} Actually, they won't each fix it in their own way. They'll recognise the brilliance of my solution and all fix it that way. :-) \end{sarcasm} Choices, and the freedom to choose your own solution is amazing. But, I acknowledge that pkgbase is an evolving solution, which is why it is just a technology preview in 15. AFAIK, the current solution is not set in stone. Having it as a technology preview promotes more widespread testing, and exposing it to more people allows problems to surface and solutions to be explored and the system improved. That's what I thought happened here: someone asked a question on a mailing list and so I offered an answer. I thought that's what the mailing lists are for? I suppose the alternative is to say, "Wait for the FreeBSD developers to solve this, even though you can work around it yourself if it's that big a problem for you." Coming back to choice: if you are unhappy with pkgbase and the integrity of your base OS, you don't even have to jump on the pkgbase merry-go-round right now. You could stick with ye olde src-based upgrade mechanism that has been around since I first started using FreeBSD back in the 3.5 days. (That's what I'm doing right now on a 15-STABLE system.) When Goldilocks determines that pkgbase is "just right" you can then make the jump. :-) Understand your risk and orient your solution accordingly. > I still don't think it's a good idea to combine base system updates and > package upgrades into a single command by default. Now even something as > simple as patch level security base update can completely break user's > desktop if package upgrade runs at the same time and the repository happens > to be missing such important packages as Firefox, Thunderbird, KDE / Plasma, > etc. > (missing packages that pkg upgrade then uninstalls from the local machine — I > see this problem far too often) In my experience, that happened before pkgbase. Having reliable update and rollback procedures is important. Cheers, Paul.
