Debian developer prompted to revisit FreeBSD after 20 years

I am considering writing a comparison command-to-command of apt-get vs. pkg, and differences in behavior.

* Are packages from the FreeBSD repos pinned the same way Ubuntu packages are, relase to release? Are there multiple repos (comparable to universe/multiverse, updates/backports)?

  * apt-get update && apt-get upgrade
  * apt-get --no-install-recommends install 
  * apt-get purge; apt-get autoclean;
  * apt-cache showpkg 
  * apt-cache search 
  * dpkg-reconfigure (for post-install scripts)

* You run Tarsnap whenever you want to push changes; Dropbox automatically pushes changes.

* Tarsnap is for 'real' computers only; Dropbox runs on my phone (which is very useful for photos, among other things).

* Tarsnap is billed by usage (at a very small amount); Dropbox has a free tier.

* Tarsnap doesn't have a natural sharing usecase; Dropbox does.

* Fundamentally, Tarsnap is backup, and Dropbox is sync. They are two different things. Not to mention that Tarsnap is also supported just fine on Linux.

My understanding was that pkgng is a architectural overhaul in addition to a simple client clean-up - configuration is different for example. What I was trying to get to was that the newer design is barely two years old in production. I should have written this more clearly and did not, thanks and sorry.

A pkgng repository can contain older versions of packages, but "/latest" is tree of symlinks to the most recent versions in the repo.

The FreeBSD Ports Tree isn't tagged, so there's nothing equivalent to updates or backports. Sometimes, that means packages won't build on older (or newer) versions of FreeBSD, or it means that the ports infrastructure as a whole won't work properly once you go more than a few releases back. The FTP archive keeps copies of binary packages included with past FreeBSD releases (all the way back to 1.0). Generally, that means everyone using the latest version of Firefox from ports on FreeBSD 9.x, 10.x, and 11.x are going to be running Firefox 35.0.1_1,1. The ports maintainer might include FreeBSD release-specific patches in the package build scripts to handle any differences among currently (or formerly) supported FreeBSD releases.

I don't remember what universe or multiverse contain. If those are the ones that have stuff separated out based on the software package's licensing, ports/pkgng includes logic to handle EULA acceptance for non-free stuff. You can also configure it to _not_ accept a license, in which case packages that use a rejected license will fail to build.

Regarding jails, please see "man pkg". You can give pkgng a jail name or ID, and it will automatically connect to that jail to perform whatever task you asked of it.

apt-get update == pkg update ("man pkg-update"), usually unnecessary

apt-get upgrade == pkg upgrade ("man pkg-upgrade"), automatically updates the repo metadata by default

apt-get purge == pkg delete ("man pkg-delete")

apt-get autoclean == pkg autoremove ("man pkg-autoremove")

apt-cache showpkg == pkg info ("man pkg-info")

apt-cache search == pkg search ("man pkg-search")

dpkg-reconfigure does not have an equivalent on FreeBSD. FreeBSD in general takes a default-deny stance on things, so post-package setup usually has to be handled by the sysadmin. There are a few packages that do some interactive post-install setup, but I personally consider this a huge bug (e.g., mail/postfix). Port maintainers generally display post-install setup instructions instead. You can read these via "pkg info". I use the Salt configuration management system, personally.

As for documentation, the FreeBSD Handbook or manual pages are always the first places you should look. There's also some info about pkgng on the wiki, but it's pretty dated as at this point, all of that stuff has been merged into FreeBSD.