Re: more pkgbase reviewers required

On 2026-03-30 18:04:04 (+0800), Lexi Winter wrote:
> [email protected] wrote in 
> <[email protected]>:
>> On 2026-03-27 11:40, Brad Davis wrote:
>>> On Fri, Mar 27, 2026, at 6:12 AM, Lexi Winter wrote:
>>>> [email protected] wrote in
>>>> <[email protected]>:
>>>>> What is the current state of FreeBSD dogfooding pkgbase?
>>>>
>>>> as far as i'm aware, no cluster machines are currently using 
>>>> pkgbase.
>>>
>>> It is being slowly deployed within the cluster.
>>
>> That's good news.  Features like pkgbase are a non-starter otherwise.
>
> as far as i'm aware, the cluster doesn't use freebsd-update either, 
> but that didn't make freebsd-update a non-starter - it's been the only 
> supported binary update mechanism for years.

Correct.

Peter wrote an article -- nearly ten years ago -- about why we don't use 
freebsd-update.  A lot of this is still accurate today:
https://blog.crashed.org/why-no-freebsd-update/

The numbers have changed and we can't upgrade everything in a few hours 
owing to interdependencies (and the accumulation of technical debt) but 
many things we can still upgrade very quickly.  (E.g. package builders 
and developer-facing machines.)

> so it's hard to see why the cluster needs to use pkgbase in order for 
> pkgbase to be viable.

For the avoidance of doubt: I agree with this. :)

> the cluster has very specific needs (they even have cluster-specific 
> build options in src) which are different from the majority of FreeBSD 
> users that pkgbase is aimed at.  of course, i would *like* the cluster 
> to use pkgbase, because it's a lot more flexible (and easier to 
> deploy) than freebsd-update was, to the point that it can replace 
> deployment from src for a lot of users, and the cluster would be a 
> good test case for that.  but that's not a requirement to ship 
> pkgbase.

pkgbase could reduce a fair bit of complexity for many of our jails.  
Though it goes without saying that we would be building our own base 
packages (just like we build our own third-party packages) rather than 
use pkg.FreeBSD.org.

Building the packages is the easy bit.  Adapting our tooling is a lot 
more work.

Philip