Clarification on future support for FreeBSD distribution sets

[Sad Clouds]

Hello, I'd like to ask for clarification on something that appeared in
the following release announcement:

https://www.freebsd.org/releases/15.0R/announce/

Specifically:

"Support for distribution sets is planned for removal in FreeBSD 16, but
will continue (along with freebsd-update support) for the lifetime of
the FreeBSD 15 stable branch."

If the above refers to deprecating freebsd-update and removing
distribution sets from bsdinstall(8) then this sounds reasonable.

On the other hand, if the above also refers to removing support for
distribution sets from all Makefiles then this is not very good.

I think traditionally, all BSD distributions provides simple archive
files which could be manually extracted. It is simple and effective and
provides a back up method of installing or updating a system when more
complex package commands fail to work correctly for some reason.

I think it would be extremely useful for FreeBSD project to continue
supporting distribution sets via existing Makefile targets. Can someone
please confirm that this will continue beyond 15.X releases?

Thanks.

[Lexi Winter]

Sad Clouds wrote in <20251207091150.12ea...@gmail.com>:
> "Support for distribution sets is planned for removal in FreeBSD 16, but
> will continue (along with freebsd-update support) for the lifetime of
> the FreeBSD 15 stable branch."
>
> If the above refers to deprecating freebsd-update and removing
> distribution sets from bsdinstall(8) then this sounds reasonable.
>
> On the other hand, if the above also refers to removing support for
> distribution sets from all Makefiles then this is not very good.

we will not remove support for building media with distribution sets
from the release Makefiles, because downstream users (e.g., CHERI)
haven't switched to pkgbase yet and still need dist set support.

what will change in 16 is that we will no longer provide dist sets
for download or on the installer media; the only supported method
to install the system will be with pkgbase.

for users who prefer to update using make installworld, there will
be a way to depkgbasify the system during installation.

[Sad Clouds]

On Tue, 9 Dec 2025 15:59:22 +0000
Lexi Winter <i...@freebsd.org> wrote:

> we will not remove support for building media with distribution sets
> from the release Makefiles, because downstream users (e.g., CHERI)
> haven't switched to pkgbase yet and still need dist set support.

Thank you. I thought this was the case but wanted to double check.