[chef] FreeBSD package provider, past and future

[Bryan McLellan < >]

Isa Farnik was asking me today about the FreeBSD package provider and
why it does all sorts of tomfoolery rather than just a pkg_add -r.
It's been a while since I administered FreeBSD boxes, and it's been
almost five years since I first wrote that provider for fun.

My frail memory was that binary packages were a silly concept that
nobody used. In trying to remember why, I see that FreeBSD 6.2 from
2007 [1] was the first release that included the ability to do a
binary upgrade. The binary repositories were apparently offline for a
while due to a security incident [2] and pkgng was written to "provide
FreeBSD with a state-of-the-art binary package management system,
something that has been sadly lacking throughout the existence of
FreeBSD" [3].

It seems to me that up until recently (FreeBSD 10 + pkgng), using
ports was still the way to go if you wanted software. Unless you
wanted to build all your own binary packages.

Thoughts or corrections?

Bryan

[1] http://www.freebsd.org/releases/6.2R/announce.html
[2] 
http://www.freebsdnews.net/2012/11/20/security-incident-freebsd-infrastructure/
[3] https://wiki.freebsd.org/pkgng/CharterAndRoadMap