I just spent the day catching up on FreeBSD email and events after a week of marshaling, and upgrading various systems to FreeBSD 15.1. Most of my various systems (servers, VMs, and jails) are still running 14.3 or 14.4 because, in my opinion, 15.0 shipped with too many unresolved warts, but now that 15.1 is out (albeit not yet announced) it is high time to not only upgrade everything to 15.1 but also make the switch to packaged base (which I was so far only using on one VM and one jail).
After a brief look at the FreeBSD Foundation’s pkgbasify script I came to the conclusion that I do not trust it to work correctly, so I developed my own method for converting a system from distribution sets to packaged base. Assuming a full install (including debug symbols, source tree, and tests) of FreeBSD 15.0-RELEASE or 15.1-RELEASE with pkg 2.7.5 recently updated to the latest patch level (if any), you can convert to packaged base with a single command:
# pkg install -r FreeBSD-base --register-only FreeBSD-set-{base,lib32,kernels}{,-dbg} FreeBSD-set-{src,tests}
(the pkg-install(8) manual page claims that you can abbreviate --register-only to -X, but you can’t, although that will be fixed in the next version)
There may be minor discrepancies between what the installer and freebsd-update(8) produced and what the packages contain, which you can usually fix with a forced upgrade:
# pkg upgrade -r FreeBSD-base -fy
If you do not have a full install, you should trim down the pkg install command line to only the sets that correspond to what you have; otherwise, the subsequent pkg upgrade will install what was missing. Particularly, you should not install FreeBSD-set-src if /usr/src is already managed by Git.
Once you’re done, you can start trimming down your system by removing sets you don’t need, then autoremoving their contents. For instance, if you’ve decided that you no longer need tests or debugging symbols:
# pkg remove -fg FreeBSD-set-\*-dbg FreeBSD-set-tests
# pkg autoremove
Note that package sets are marked vital so you must use -f when removing them.
Now is the time to enable the FreeBSD-base repository, by the way. Manually specifying it with -r FreeBSD-base temporarily enables it for the current command, but you’ll want it permanently enabled:
# mkdir -p /usr/local/etc/pkg/repos
# echo 'FreeBSD-base: { enabled: yes }' >/usr/local/etc/pkg/repos/FreeBSD-base.conf
Finally, if on bare metal or a VM, create a boot environment of your converted system:
# bectl create $(pkg query %v FreeBSD-runtime)
The only issue I’ve noticed after converting one bare-metal server and the eight jails it hosts is that pkg leaf does not take shared library dependencies into account:
# sudo pkg -j myjail leaf
FreeBSD-bluetooth-lib-15.1
FreeBSD-set-base-jail-15.1
FreeBSD-ufs-lib-15.1
FreeBSD-zfs-lib-15.1
pkg-2.7.5
Those three -lib packages provide libraries which are used by other base packages, but the dependencies are all implicit, so they show up as leaves despite not actually being removable.