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

[Slawa Olhovchenkov]

On Thu, Mar 10, 2016 at 03:58:55PM +0000, Matthew Seaman wrote:

> On 2016/03/10 14:52, Slawa Olhovchenkov wrote:
> > I.e. all DBMS will be lost data on OS switch, ntp lost information,
> > information about installing and removing non-system packages also
> > lost and packages too (i.e. I can't install MySQL and time later
> > switch back to previos OS version w/o lost of data and installed packages).
> 
> If you're going to install an RDBMS application then it would be
> expected that you'ld prepare a special (and probably specially tuned)
> ZFS for the data storage area before you created any databases.
> Unfortunately, neither the default location for mysql (/var/db/mysql)
> nor postgres (/usr/local/pgsql) makes that particularly trivial --
> you'ld have to use two 'canmount=off' ZFSes apiece to do the overlay
> trick, or else you'ld have to reconfigure the databases to put their
> data areas in a more easy-to-use place.
> 
> It's not really surprising though -- hier(7) has roots going back to the
> days when there was a pretty much one-to-one relation between hard
> drives and file systems (and those HDDs contained of the order of 100s
> of MB and cost an absolute fortune), and the big deal was to be able to
> cope in the face of distressingly frequent hard drive failures.
> 
> The whole concept of 'this bit of the filesystem is intrinsic to the
> particular OS version' and 'this other bit is generic data or needs to
> be consistent across different OS versions' is a new requirement that
> has come in with the advent of Boot Environments.  If you were designing
> the filesystem layout from scratch with boot environments and ZFS in
> mind, you'ld arrange things pretty differently I'm sure.

Sorry, I am missed you point.
Currently bsdinstall proposed some layout, designed for BE.
Release to release this layout changed w/o notice in UPDATE/Relnotes.

Design of this layout not trivial, especially for general FreeBSD
user. IMHO, FreeBSD must be provide safe layout, don't lose data under
BE.