> On Aug 8, 2025, at 11:00 AM, Dimitry Andric <d...@freebsd.org> wrote:
>
> On 8 Aug 2025, at 15:56, David Chisnall <thera...@freebsd.org> wrote:
>>
>> On 8 Aug 2025, at 14:42, Dag-Erling Smørgrav <d...@freebsd.org> wrote:
>>>
>>> Tomek CEDRO <to...@cedro.info> writes:
>>>> [...] from user perspective these changes were easy to adapt to :-)
>>>
>>> So will this one.
>>
>> Let’s remember the thing that started this entire thread: `pkg delete -af`
>>
>> This is an *incredibly* stupid thing to do. Long before pkg came along, I
>> did the equivalent of this and managed to lock myself out of a headless box
>> by doing this because I forgot that I was using the ports version of openssh
>> instead of the base one.
>
> I'm one of the people that regularly runs `pkg delete -af`, even with `-y`
> added. :) That said, I only use this when I have completely rebuilt a ports
> collection with poudriere against a newer base jail, and then I'd like to
> start completely from scratch with freshly installed packages. This also
> clears out any unnecessary non-leaf packages there were pulled in by a
> previous package build.
Yeah, this thread is frustrating because on one hand we have users saying
"here's why this is bad" and developers just saying "nobody does that" to
someone who is doing that. There's no way to know how many people do that, and
there's nothing productive in just saying those people are "using FreeBSD
wrong". It's not like the handbook is going to teach you actual systems admin
skills to the point where you know the "why's" of what you're doing.
As an analogy, imagine a house. The house is the OS. The furniture is your
collection of packages. If I call a mover to empty my house because the
furniture no longer fits my needs, has been around too long or something and
the mover takes all my furniture out and then plants explosives around the
house to make it uninhabitable, that's not great.
>
> Obviously that is an outlier scenario! But does pkg have a way to express
> "show me packages only from this particular repo", or "delete only packages
> from this particular repo"? That would make it easy to do "delete only the
> packages from ports, not from base".
Even better, the "-af" flag simply doesn't touch base. PKGBASE is new. Adding a
single flag to pkg that indicates operations are being performed on the base
system, or even minimally some warnings (who's going to spot a handful of base
pkgs in a list of hundreds when running even an interactive purge of all pkgs?)
when the command is run, why are people against simple measures like that? I
really fail to see why the people creating this new feature, which I'm sure is
useful for some vendor or other funding this stuff, cannot accept that there
are actual, real, normal users out there who a) don't care about PKGBASE b)
believe POLA adoption in the past is what has made this OS pretty great to use
and c) don't see any value in doing a base upgrade and pkg upgrade at the same
time (DES mentioned this as a feature, but I have no interest in upgrading two
wildly different codebases at the same time and have never wanted to do that).
Charles
>
> -Dimitry
>
>
