On Fri, Aug 8, 2025 at 2:30 PM Dag-Erling Smørgrav <d...@freebsd.org> wrote:
>
> Tomek CEDRO <to...@cedro.info> writes:
> > Not really. So far "the FreeBSD standard" kept things "similar" for
> > over 30 years. If we traveled back/forward in time we would still use
> > the same approach to configure and run stuff. Maybe except pkg-add was
> > replaced with pkg, but still all locations are the same, configuration
> > files format, ports build, etc.
>
> I'm sorry but that's pure fantasy. In the last 30 years, we've switched
> our init system twice, the main system configuration moved from
> /etc/sysconfig to /etc/rc.conf, and we later added /etc/rc.conf.d and
> per-service subdirectories. The ports tree is also completely different
> from what it was 15 years ago, let alone 30: we've switched to staged,
> unprivileged builds, we've added USES and FLAVOR, we switched the
> primary identifier from the origin to PKGNAME, we switched to pkg (which
> is a much bigger change than you seem to realize)... If anything, the
> separation between base and ports is stronger now than ever, because we
> used to allow ports to install files outside of ${LOCALBASE} and even
> replace parts of the base system.
Yes, but from user perspective these changes were easy to adapt to :-)
> Packaged base has been in the works for a decade and it's going in.
> There are rough edges, but we'll sort them out and the end result will
> be much, much easier to manage for everybody than what we have now. By
> the time FreeBSD 16.0 comes around, it will be second nature, and you
> will have a hard time remembering what the fuss was all about.
Looks like 15 will be a "great adventure", that just started with a
pre-release and early testing feedback. I hope it turns out well in
the end, as planned, I believe you know what you are doing, I really
keep my fingers crossed, good luck guys :-)
Maybe its just worth considering putting EOL to 14 after 16.1 is out? :-P
> > > [...] packages installed from ports might depend on packages from
> > > the base system [...]
> > This statement is extremely dangerous. It touches clue of this
> > discussion. It seems to reveal planning to totally break current
> > FreeBSD design / architecture? So far "base" could work without
> > "userland", provided consistent, coherent, and predictable working
> > environment. Everyone had the same set of "base" tools where
> > "userland" could be built on top, so every system could be different
> > but had exactly the same base. I can see that "base" will not be
> > coherent for everyone anymore. If ports start depending on base
> > packages then circular dependencies will arise and this will be a
> > Linux-like-mess, because there could be different versions of base
> > packages for different port versions that will depend on different
> > versions of base packages. Then all will be just a package and there
> > will be no "coherent FreeBSD base" anymore right? Then 14-RELEASE will
> > hit end-of-lie and people will be _forced_ to switch to 15-RELEASE or
> > move away to different BSD. This sounds like FreeBSD is going full
> > Linux :-(
>
> It's bad form to quote a large paragraph without summarizing, but this
> is so unhinged I couldn't figure out what to cut. It's completely off
> the wall, starting with the use of “userland”, a well-established term
> meaning “code that isn't part of the kernel”, to mean... something else
> that I can't quite figure out. But also, there is nothing circular at
> all about ports depending on base. That's the way it's always been,
> even if we didn't explicitly record it in package metadata (apart from
> the shlib login in recent versions of pkg).
Its just fear, outlined by a speculation, sure, we don't know how this
story ends, but this fear is shared and expressed here by many folks,
that FreeBSD may turn into Linux, a place where lots of us been and
never want to come back, not to mention any commercial closed source
OS :-)
Maybe a (wiki?) reference page with clear outline of benefits, goals,
identified problems, and todos would cut all those speculations?
Thanks! :-)
Tomek
ps/2: will this pkgbase allow running 15/16 on 2MB Flash and 8MB RAM router? :D
--
CeDeROM, SQ7MHZ, http://www.tomek.cedro.info
