Re: RFC: Renaming "FreeBSD" repo in /etc/pkg/FreeBSD.conf to "FreeBSD-ports"

Gleb Popov <[email protected]>
Newsgroups gmane.os.freebsd.devel.ports,gmane.os.freebsd.current
Message-ID <CALH631=w4Uv+RBTkRX0UZG9ktV9whtjaxSSOcmLmKnx7ARafww@mail.gmail.com>
On Wed, Aug 20, 2025 at 12:48 PM Matteo Riondato <[email protected]> wrote:
>
> It’s unclear (to me) whether that’s the *correct* way, or the *recommended* way (pkg(8) calls it “a common idiom”), and in either case *why* is that the recommended/correct way: what breaks if one modifies /etc/FreeBSD.conf ? Why does it break?

The /etc/pkg/FreeBSD.conf file comes from base (some pkgbase package
or as a result of make installworld or something like that). This
means that system upgrades must handle edits to this file somehow -
either by overwriting your changes with vanilla version or by merging
them, which can't be done 100% automatically.

So encouraging users to not touch system configs but rather write
add-ons to these configs make upgrades less painful.

> Also, it seems that whether having “repository-name: { enabled: false}” would actually disable respository-name  would depend on the order of directories in the configuration variable REPOS_DIR. This feels quite brittle.

This is also a very common problem which has an established solution
by prefixing config files with numbers, like
10-disable-freebsd-repos.conf
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