Putting all of a BSD in separate packages is going to make evolving the various parts together more difficult. See for instance the ease with which OpenBSD does ABI changes (I know FreeBSD doesn’t do that, just an illustration).
I'm using package base on FreeBSD 14.0 and 14.1. Upgrading the system worked as expected.
FreeBSD already has a documented official way to deal with ABI breakages. You're supposed to install the new kernel only, reboot, install rest of the new release (including updating /etc) and reboot again. Next upgrade the installed ports/packages. Afterward delete the old files (and libraries) and reboot again.
Upgrading/reinstalling all installed packages during the userland upgrade after the first reboot takes care of that on a package base installation whenever the ABI triple changes. If you're using ZFS boot environments they provide an even faster and safer way to upgrade without rebooting in between steps by creating a new boot environment from the currently active one, mounting it as a jail (or chroot env) and pointing the package manager at the mountpoint.
Neither OpenBSD nor FreeBSD are still commonly used without at least one binary package installed so the complexity of having a package manager that works isn't optional.
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Putting all of a BSD in separate packages is going to make evolving the various parts together more difficult. See for instance the ease with which OpenBSD does ABI changes (I know FreeBSD doesn’t do that, just an illustration).
I'm using package base on FreeBSD 14.0 and 14.1. Upgrading the system worked as expected.
FreeBSD already has a documented official way to deal with ABI breakages. You're supposed to install the new kernel only, reboot, install rest of the new release (including updating /etc) and reboot again. Next upgrade the installed ports/packages. Afterward delete the old files (and libraries) and reboot again.
Upgrading/reinstalling all installed packages during the userland upgrade after the first reboot takes care of that on a package base installation whenever the ABI triple changes. If you're using ZFS boot environments they provide an even faster and safer way to upgrade without rebooting in between steps by creating a new boot environment from the currently active one, mounting it as a jail (or chroot env) and pointing the package manager at the mountpoint.
Neither OpenBSD nor FreeBSD are still commonly used without at least one binary package installed so the complexity of having a package manager that works isn't optional.