Followup on packaging base with pkg(8)

Dear FreeBSD community: Early this year, it was announced [1] that FreeBSD 11.0-RELEASE would ship not only with the ability to package the base system with pkg(8), but the intent to use pkg(8) as the primary binary upgrade mechanism for the base system. Despite the schedule adjustment for 11.0-RELEASE to allow additional time to resolve several issues prior to the merge to head, too many issues remained. Following the merge to head, many more issues were discovered, some resolved, but many without a clear, non-disruptive solution. Given the state of this highly-disruptive change to the base system, we need to take the best interest of the FreeBSD community into primary consideration, as a whole. We have arrived at the difficult decision to treat packaged base as a "beta" feature for 11.0-RELEASE, and continue with freebsd-update(8) as the primary binary upgrade mechanism for this release. Development on this change will continue in head and stable/11 (when it is branched), however, with the target goal of transitioning to pkg(8) for the base system for 11.1-RELEASE. We fully intend to do this in a way that does not constitute a POLA violation, especially on an established -STABLE branch. The details on how we will attempt this transition are still to be determined, however all technical, solvable details. But we will ensure as best as we can to avoid violating POLA for the transition while the remaining issues are resolved. At this point, the risks far outweigh the benefits, especially taking into consideration some of the more recent fallout of several changes. Thank you to everyone who supported this effort, and we hope you will continue to support and test the forward development of packaging the base system with pkg(8). Thank you. [1] https://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-pkgbase/2016-January/000000.html Glen On behalf of: re@ -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: signature.asc Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 819 bytes Desc: not available URL: <http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-pkgbase/attachments/20160519/9c73dd47/attachment.sig>