Work is progressing quickly on a major re-factoring of PC-BSD tools and the PBI format for 9.0. Our GUI tools have been converted to compile / run within native QT without KDE now, allowing us to begin offering support for other desktop environments for 9.0, such as Gnome, XFCE, LXDE, KDE, etc. The PBI format has undergone a complete evolution, and is now entirely command-line based for all aspects of it, with only a few dependencies upon curl & xdg-utils. This will allow us to begin offering PBIs for traditional FreeBSD users starting with 9.0, who will be able to install the pbi-manager from ports in the near future.
I just read this in the quarterly status report and was wondering if anyone else is excited about this as I am. Maybe it will completely replace packages.