I partly agree that adding KDE to the installer is a bad idea. Not for a technical reason, after all it is always possible to say "no" when the installer asks whether X/KDE should be installed. But for a sociological / philosophical reason: It shows that the FreeBSD community is wanting to put effort into making desktop use easier and smoother, and I think that use case is a waste of time for FreeBSD, as there are many better options available for desktops. It is also the camel's nose under the tent: I suspect that soon, X and a DE will be a requirement for installing and running FreeBSD, probably in the name of streamlining and simplification, as has happened (long ago) to OpenBSD, where one can't run without xbase.tgz. That is not just unnecessary bloat, but a maintenance and security headache.
I have no problem with GPLed software being added to FreeBSD, either in base or elsewhere. While I think that the GPL is a dumb license (and RMS a clueless and wrong-headed person), the world has moved so much towards GPLed software that being dogmatic about the GPL is simply no longer practical. And as long as one doesn't (a) modify GPLed software, and (b) distribute that modified software to others, the GPL has no practical effect.
I'm very much in favor of adding Rust to the base system, and starting to migrate code away from C and onto a modern language. C was a great thing in the 1970s, compared to the alternatives (PL-S, Assembly, Bliss and whatever else we had back then for systems development). But that was 50 years ago, and today C (and even more C++) is a bad programming language, which doesn't make coding efficient and safe.
But the real topic of discussion that is unique to this thread is pkgbase, and I just don't know enough about it yet. I have read the
Wiki page for pkgbase, and it is not terribly clear, but it answers a few questions, most importantly: An existing system that's based on bsdinstall / freebsd-update and txz files can be upgraded by first converting it using pkgbasify, so moving from 14 to 15 will not require a reinstall. But how does one get pkgbasify? The link goes to a GitHub page, and I need it either installed for me as part of base, or as a pkg, or shipped with the upgrade system. I don't even have git installed on my FreeBSD machines, nor am I planning to install it.
What is completely missing from that wiki page is a discussion of the "why". For me, as a user of the OS, what does pkgbase do better? How does it help me? Until I know that, why should I use it?
Where is pkgbase in the handbook? Nowhere. That alone disqualifies it from use.
The thing that is seriously disturbing about that wiki page is the complexity and lack of user-friendliness. To quote an old colleague: pkgbase operation (in particular regular upgrades) seems to have glass shards on all surfaces. Today, to go to the next minor version, I do "freebsd-update -R 13.x-RELEASE fetch/install", a 4-step procedure (fetch, then 2x install with one reboot in between), using a simple command and just one extra parameter on the command line (the -R flag). With pkgbase, that becomes a 7-step procedure, and several steps require long commands with multiple options. For major version upgrades it gets outright scary, when the instructions tell you to guess your ABI (why? the computer should know it!) and then the instructions tell you to not allow a step that you are prompted to do. To me, it seems that pkgbase needs a lot of sandpaper and smoothing before it is ready for prime time.
The upgrade to 15 becomes mandatory somewhere around 2028. If the FreeBSD community wants to move to a mandatory pkgbase by that time, it has a lot of work to do first. I have no visibility into whether that work is being done.