Re: pkg upgrade with inverting match?

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.