[CFT] packaging the base system with pkg(8)

[Miroslav Lachman]

> It would also be nice to get a statement of what the intended scope of
> these patches is from some of the people involved in the project. It's a
> major change to the system and it would be nice to have some kind of
> architectural document about what is happening. I'm not sure, for
> instance, what the release for 11 looks like with these changes, what
> changes need to be made to the installer (something of particular
> interest to me), how we build install media now that base is no longer
> self-contained (due to lack of pkg), what specific problems were
> intended to be solved, how package dependencies work, etc. Something
> like a few-page white paper would be *really* helpful for those of us
> who weren't at the BSDcan where this was discussed. Even a wiki page
> would help a lot.

I really like FreeBSD, I am using it for more than 15 years on daily 
basis. FreeBSD had good and bad times (releases / changes) but one thing 
stays always the same - still bad communication about new features, work 
in progress etc.
I think it is not too hard to publish papers about new base packages. 
Proposals, current state, ToDo to better inform users about upcoming 
changes. I think these informations already exist in some private form 
between developers.
If these informations were more public I think there will be less 
annoyed posts in mailinglist and more constructive critics / ideas / 
patches.

I did a guick search and found only one closely related page about 
packaged base:
https://wiki.freebsd.org/FreeBSD-ng last edited 2014-03-11

Even this old page has "Known problems" mentioning the situation what we 
have now in this thread (fed-up people on both sides). So I think this 
was expected and people involved in this project could have do 
communication better.

I had some concerns about it and some of them were explained and 
canceled after reading more than 100 posts in this thread. (some 
concerns remain). I believe if it was written in FreeBSD Wiki, there 
were not be so much dissapointed posts.

I don't want to offend anybody on this list or FreeBSD team. I just 
think that things like this can and should be communicated better next 
time. Sysadmins and sysdevelopers have different point of view to a lot 
of things and it is better to talk about it before things are done and 
cannot be undone.

Miroslav Lachman