Dan Langille @dvl@bsd.network

Do you have a special jail on #FreeBSD which has no network access? You can update that jail (FOO) from the host with this command:

# pkg --rootdir /jails/FOO upgrade -yr FreeBSD-base

#FreeBSD #jail

This seems like a useful tool:

"pkg-be-plugin is a pkg(8) plugin that automatically creates a ZFS boot environment before each install, upgrade, or deinstall transaction. If a transaction leaves the system in a broken state, the pre-transaction BE provides a clean rollback point.

The plugin uses libbe(3) directly with no subprocess invocations of bectl(8) or zfs(8). Boot environments are pruned automatically basedon a configurable keep count and minimum age."

https://www.freshports.org/ports-mgmt/pkg-be-plugin/

#FreeBSD #pkg #ZFS

When do FreeBSD commits happen?

docs - https://news.freshports.org/2026/09/26/when-do-commits-happen-in-the-freebsd-docs-tree/

ports - https://news.freshports.org/2026/09/26/when-do-commits-happen-to-the-freebsd-ports-tree/

src - https://news.freshports.org/2026/09/26/when-do-commits-happen-in-the-src-tree/

#FreeBSD

FYI, ports which get their PORTVERSION from outside their own Makefile has been a years-old problem for FreshPorts. Unless FreshPorts knows it has changed, it can't keep the database current. The most likely solution now appears to be INDEX, as suggested by mat - parse it, compare against the DB, update.

Full disclosure, most of this coding is being done by Claude. It's a 425 line shell script, with some of that being an SQL query.

Comments on that approach welcome: https://gist.github.com/dlangille/74f5de44b4b8534674d45e35e2a0cb24

#FreeBSD #FreshPorts

New toy.

Here's a clever way to know if any updates have happened since the last time we ran. Run an md5 over all the active port for name, version, revision, epoch....

It's a fast query: about 1.3 seconds.

I'm not using it for anything. It's just something that came up...

freshports.dev=# SELECT md5(string_agg(category || '/' || name || ' ' || version ||
coalesce('_' || revision, '') ||
coalesce(',' || portepoch, ''), E'\n' ORDER BY category, name))
FROM ports_active;
md5
----------------------------------
88d6a009e0bfc523a56e896cae43dc23
(1 row)

freshports.dev=#

#FreshPorts #FreeBSD

This has been fixed on all hosts.

Claude AI has noticed that FreshPorts has transposed EXTRACT_DEPENDS and PATCH_DEPENDS in the database.

This was previously unknown.

There are at least 5300 ports which this affects.

Claude also supplied a fix. I'll deploy that to test and try it out there.

FYI, all this was in support of providing support RUN_AND_BUILD_DEPENDS before it gets implemented: https://reviews.freebsd.org/D59664

#FreeBSD #FreshPorts

Reseating the NVMe stick worked.

Details in original URL.

The reboot did not help. Sounds like I need to open up the case and reseat

An NVMe stick disappeared. I'll wait a bit before booting the host.

And have I mentioned https://watchgoose.com ?

See https://dan.langille.org/2026/09/12/data04-degraded-oh-and-have-i-mentioned-watchgoose/

#FreeBSD #ZFS

Progress on parsing Mk/bsd.default-versions:

* the table of known *_DEFAULT value is populated, and very quickly
* staring to query each port to find out if PORTVERSION is affected by any one of those *_DEFAULT values

Imagine something like this:

make -C /jails/freshports/usr/ports/sysutils/qdirstat -V PORTVERSION -V DISTVERSION GUILE_DEFAULT=1.8

make -C /jails/freshports/usr/ports/sysutils/qdirstat -V PORTVERSION -V DISTVERSION IMAGEMAGICK_DEFAULT=999999.9999

etc, contine through all 39 *_DEFAULT values to find out if one of the affects PORTVERSION

Then repeat those 2 * 39 make calls for every active port.

This may take a while.

See https://news.freshports.org/2026/09/11/creating-and-populating-the-tables-for-defaultversions/

#FreeBSD #FreshPorts

This morning I did some update to a dev instance of #FreshPorts - I'll know more after the next commit to Mk/bsd.default-versions.mk how it's working.

Yes, I could rerun an old commit.

And I probably will, but for now, the code is in there and I'm working on other things for now.

#FreeBSD

I was wondering why my #FreeBSD dev host was sluggish this morning:

[12:06:49] dvl@pkg01:~/ports/head(main) % w
12:06PM up 6 days, 18:29, 3 users, load averages: 85.75, 83.82, 70.43
...

[12:06:50] dvl@pkg01:~/ports/head(main) % jls | wc -l
47

It's busy building via #poudriere.

Now that I'm into pkgbase on #FreeBSD, I've updated my procedure for updating FreshPorts working jails. These are jails in a jail. In short, I'm using bsdinstall for that.

https://news.freshports.org/2026/09/08/updating-a-jail-by-replacing-it-2-0-0/

mkjail-0.2.2 is now in the #FreeBSD ports tree.

The previous release added pkgbase to `mkjail update` and `mkjail upgrade`. This release converts `mkjail create` to be pkgbase aware.

Legacy jails are still supported.

https://bsd.network/@dvl/117225363239426937

Yesterday and today I started using mkjail-0.2.1 for creating a new jail. It works well for updating and upgrading pkgbase jails.

The newly created jail wasn't pkgbase. I fixed it. There are optimizations available but a new release will come soon. Perhaps later today.

Walk first. Run later.

#FreeBSD #pkgbase