Do you will upgrade to release 15? Or what is your general major version upgrade scheme?

[cy@]

hah, well... yes, except if you use ports packages from pkg.freebsd.org, in which case the text change causes all your packages to suddenly vanish until the builders catch up and publish packages for the new release. (then you get to learn about overriding ${ABI} in pkg.) this is one of the reasons i always tell people not to use pkg.f.o for -CURRENT, but it would be nice if we could make that work a bit nicer.

Because sometimes all we can base our updates on is a text string. This is a problem even if you have your own poudriere. The text string is baked into package meta-file. Could we (ports) do better? Most certainly. With compatibility shims in place this would never be a problem. Look at how symbols are versioned in libraries. A library will support multiple versions of a function or syscall, i.e. statfs(2). The library supports 64-bit and legacy (32-bit) inode arguments.

(also, for some reason the switch to 16 broke the net-snmp port, presumably because they have some whitelist of versions.)

That's because some software, typically GNU configure, looks at the version string. There's not getting around that. But generally, if one follows -CURRENT the changes are incremental.

 

[Zare]

When we move to pkgbase, will we have all those few hundred system packages listed in pkg info, or will we have some sort of separation?

For example I dislike how dpkg -l on a minimal Debian install still spews out few screens of packages.

This all sounds too Linuxy and I'm not sure I like it that much (albeit seeing the benefits too). I'm not sure why I want to have all those base parts separated.

 

[anguisette]

When we move to pkgbase, will we have all those few hundred system packages listed in pkg info

yes.

For example I dislike how dpkg -l on a minimal Debian install still spews out few screens of packages.

you can filter by pkg name (pkg info | grep -v '^FreeBSD') or by origin (pkg query -e '%o !~ base/*' '%n-%v %c'). if you do that a lot, add an alias in pkg.conf or in your shell.

This all sounds too Linuxy and I'm not sure I like it that much (albeit seeing the benefits too).

well, Solaris released with pkgbase in 1992 and it worked the same way. did Sun copy Linux?

 

[RetroComputingCollector]

Exactly. I will stay on 13.x as long as there is a supported 13.x version. Then I will switch to 14.x, and stay on that as long as there is support, which I think is until 2028 or thereabouts. Not clear yet whether I will move to 15.x ever; that depends on whether by then pkgbase and the foundation's newfound love for desktop/laptop support make it a desirable option for a server-class machine.

I am actually considering switching some of my machines to NetBSD, as I feel like FreeBSD is going down a road to Linux. NetBSD has a better non-linuxified X implementation, and no pkgbase. I fear I will have to stick on 14.x until it is EOLed, slowly replacing FreeBSD installs with NetBSD, as the EOL date grows nearer, and in the end only having one FreeBSD machine left. By the way, I tried pkgbase. It sucks as much as an industrial vacuum. Hopefully I don't have to abandon FreeBSD, and I still don't think I have the follow-through to do it, but I might if it gets bad enough.

 

[bakul]

I got a Mac Mini (late 2014) for almost nothing. Installed 15.0-ALPHA5 painlessly (using package install from a memstick image snapshot). This will replace a server so I have tested only things I need but X11 came up fine.

There are 304 FreeBSD-* packages which is a bit distressing (but I felt the same way when they split up xorg into a zillion little pieces). On the other hand I also complain about the texlive-texmf package weighing in at 3GB!

 

[astyle]

There are 304 FreeBSD-* packages

I have about 5 times that many packages, and I compile from ground up and I change the Makefile knobs in Ports. At least I'm not beholden to somebody else compiling my GPU drivers on a schedule that I don't wanna know or put in effort to find out.

I'm running 14.2-RELEASE as my daily driver, and y'know what, every time I deal with Windows Update on a couple other machines at my place, WU never ceases to amaze me with the plentiful harvest of brand-new reasons to stay away from Windows. If I had just a dollar for every new reason to stay away from Windows, I could solve WIkipedia's fundraising needs for at least 10 years, easy.

Saying that in these days we have VM's. Just try around there and see what happens.

One kind of needs enough metal at their disposal before talking about running VMs...

 

[Zare]

yes.

you can filter by pkg name (pkg info | grep -v '^FreeBSD') or by origin (pkg query -e '%o !~ base/*' '%n-%v %c'). if you do that a lot, add an alias in pkg.conf or in your shell.


well, Solaris released with pkgbase in 1992 and it worked the same way. did Sun copy Linux?

This is the exact reply I did not want to get. I'll refrain from posting sarcastic remarks about the discovery of grep.

It is what it is and I don't like it.