Packaging the FreeBSD base system with pkg(8)

[David Chisnall]

On 28 Jan 2016, at 17:45, NGie Cooper <yaneurabeya at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> Also, consider that you're going to be allowing upgrades from older RELEASE versions of the OS which might be using a fixed copy of pkgng -- how are you going to support that?

I believe that the plan is to promote the pkg tool somewhat closer to the base system.  Upgrades will do the same sort of thing that they do currently for ports:

1. First check if the version of pkg is the latest
2. If not, upgrade it
3. Do the real upgrade

The package for package is simply a tarball.  It may be advantageous to separate the pkg and pkg-static binaries into different packages, so that pkg can always install pkg-static and pkg-static can always update pkg.

There is no guarantee that the pkg tool from X.Y can install any packages from X+n.Y.m other than the pkg-static binary, which can then upgrade the rest of the system.

The provision of pkg-static prevents us from being in the situation that I encountered trying to upgrade a Debian system (and ending up with a mess requiring a full reinstall) where apt needed a newer glibc and the glibc package needed a newer apt to install it.  We will always provide a pkg-static for every supported branch that can be installed by any earlier version of pkg (because it’s just extracting a single-file archive - and in the absolute worst case you can do this by hand) and can install newer packages.

David