Packaging the FreeBSD base system with pkg(8)

[Slawa Olhovchenkov]

On Thu, Jan 28, 2016 at 06:48:12PM -0500, Garrett Wollman wrote:

> <<On Thu, 28 Jan 2016 19:06:22 +0300, Slawa Olhovchenkov <slw at zxy.spb.ru> said:
> 
> > What about upgrade strongly outdated system?
> > For example 11.0 at time 18.0? I.e. packages for 11.0 don't available,
> > pkg from 11.0 don't undertund package base from 18.0 and etc.
> 
> We've never supported this for source upgrades; I don't see any reason
> to expect it to work for binary upgrades either.  At a minimum you
> should expect to have to upgrade 11.0 -> latest 11.x -> latest 12.x ->
> ... -> latest 17.x -> 18.0.

You miss some points. Source upgrades suported over-release upgrade
(currently 10-STABLE can be upgraded from 7.0, see Makefile.inc1).
Source upgrade is self-contained and don't depend from environment.
Contrary to binary upgrade may depend of environment: presents pkg.txz
on ftp.freebsd.org, freebsd.org ovned by project and etc. As result,
in case of bad design, you can't upgrade from 11.0 nowhere (ex: packages
for 11.x outdated and deleted, pkg.txz from latest suported release
can't be run on 11.0, pkg from 11.0 can't be parsed latest format).

I am not averse to binary upgrade path like
11.0-12.last-14.last-15.last-16.last-18.0. I am disagree case when
impossible to upgrade outdated install (because url is now incorrect,
packages for outdated release removed or lost and etc).