Re: Unable to boot after update from within auto-admin

On Wednesday, May 13th, 2026 at 12:58 PM, Jason Bacon <[email protected]> wrote:
[...]
> Again, I'm certain that auto-update-system did not hose the system,
> since it only runs the standard existing tools pkg autoremove/upgrade,
> git pull, and maybe freebsd-update.  There must have been some unusual
> circumstance in your case that would have resulted in this problem
> whether or not you used auto-update-system.
> 
> Using auto-update-system is actually much safer than running the tools
> manually, because it ensures that everything remains in sync.  Many
> newbies have run into serious problems in the past because their ports
> tree and installed packages were out of sync, causing incompatibilities.
>   The same could happen with an antiquated base, though that's less
> likely, unless it's actually beyond EOL.

It's nice to feel certain, but if this could happen to me, it could happen to someone else.

The user should clearly be informed about what is going on, prior to executing this program they've probably never heard of, the mysterious popup notification could just as easily be misintepreted as malware.

Do we want more newbies using FreeBSD and can we take a few moments to inform/warn them or do we want to push them away?

If I had less patience and if I didn't care so much about FreeBSD, I would've been maybe one, or maybe one of many to come across this, have my system be hosed and just given up. No discussion, no questions, nothing. Just given up on FreeBSD.

New users deserve to know more about why their system is issuing popups in a poorly executed manner, and what auto-admin is.

In my opinion, auto-admin and the notification package(s) should not be pulled in by desktop-installer.

My system was fine until I ran auto-admin and chose to update with it as the popup suggested.

I'm now under a new install and the first thing I did after running desktop-installer to install XFCE was to remove auto-admin and the two other related packages, one being a notification package.

My system is purring along just fine without it!