Background: FreeBSD and pkg

• Baptiste Daroussin has used FreeBSD since 1998 and became a committer in 2010.
• His involvement grew from desktop use and experimenting with large ports such as OpenOffice.
• He began developing pkgng, which later became FreeBSD’s modern pkg package manager.
• Initially inspired by NetBSD’s pkgin, he and Julien Laffaye created a new package manager after encountering limitations in the existing tooling.
• Poudriere was developed alongside pkg to rapidly build packages and test the package manager.

pkg: 15 Years Later

• Daroussin did not expect to still be working on pkg 15 years later.
• He says many of his original ideas remain unfinished.
• Package management has become much more complex than simply extracting files:
  • Upgrades and dependency handling require sophisticated logic.
  • pkg uses a SAT solver for dependency resolution.
  • This complexity makes it difficult for new developers to contribute.

Security Improvements

Daroussin is particularly focused on reducing the security risks of package installation scripts.

• Traditional packages can contain scripts that execute as root.
• Newer mechanisms include centrally reviewable triggers.
• Lua-based package scripts can run sandboxed using Capsicum.
• His long-term goal is to prevent package-provided scripts from executing unrestricted as root altogether.

Challenges Attracting Contributors

• Although eight people can merge changes into pkg, relatively few actively do so.
• The codebase is more complicated than it initially appears.
• Another obstacle is the absence of a clearly documented long-term roadmap.
• Contributors may hesitate to make architectural changes because they are unsure whether those changes align with Daroussin’s plans.
• Despite this, he says pkg still attracts more contributors than some other FreeBSD subsystems.

PkgBase: A Decade-Long Project

PkgBase aims to distribute and manage parts of the FreeBSD base system using packages rather than the traditional monolithic update/install model.

• Daroussin was already advocating PkgBase around BSDCan 2015.
• The main obstacle was not package-manager technology but a lack of sustained effort and motivation.
• Momentum increased more recently because:
  • OCI developers wanted small FreeBSD container images.
  • Developers including Ed Maste, Kyle Evans, Mark Johnston, Lexi, and manu@ contributed significant work.
  • Commercial requirements also provided funding and practical motivation.

Why Large FreeBSD Changes Take So Long

Daroussin sees FreeBSD’s predominantly volunteer structure as the fundamental difficulty for major system-wide projects.

• Large changes require coordination across many parts of FreeBSD.
• Companies have previously developed PkgBase-like systems for their own requirements, but often lacked the resources to complete full upstream integration.
• Commercial sponsorship can provide initial momentum, but business priorities can change before the work is finished.
• Major infrastructure projects therefore often depend on a small number of highly motivated individuals carrying them through.

Key takeaway

The evolution of pkg and PkgBase illustrates a broader FreeBSD challenge: the technical solution may exist years before enough sustained developer effort, coordination, and commercial motivation align to deploy it across the entire operating system.

Packaging, CloudInit, and Revisiting “The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly”