Indeed, it has never been that simple and robust. You can also follow this guide:
https://www.freebsd.org/releases/15.1R/installation/#upgrade-pkg On 21 June 2026 16:01:11 CEST, "Dag-Erling Smørgrav" <[email protected]> wrote: >Mike <[email protected]> writes: >> Now, as I understand the pkgbase system, it has gotten a bit more >> complex. > >On the contrary... > >> I no longer see that easy ability to update from one patch level to >> the current patch level within the installed version. > >To upgrade a pkgbase system, simply run: > > # pkg upgrade > >or, if you want to upgrade _only_ the base system and leave the rest >untouched: > > # pkg upgrade -r FreeBSD-base > >This essentially replaces `freebsd-update fetch` and `freebsd-update >install` in your script, including the intervening prompt, and the rest >will work as before. If you want to get fancy, do: > > # pkg upgrade -r FreeBSD-base -Fy > >to download updated packagtes without installing them, then > > # pkg upgrade -r FreeBSD-base > >to prompt the user and install the downloaded packages. This will also >avoid a rare situation (very unlikely to occur with pkgbase on a release >branch) where pkg computes an upgrade plan, prompts the user, then >computes a different plan after examining the packages it downloaded and >prompts the user a second time. > >A reboot is always recommended, unless you know exactly what was updated >and can manually restart all affected services (or you know that none of >the services that you run are affected). That was always the case. > >> https://wiki.freebsd.org/PkgBase > >This is severely out of date and (like most of the wiki) was always more >of an internal roadmap than any sort of user documentation. > >DES >-- >Dag-Erling Smørgrav - [email protected] >
