How's package management? I switched away from *BSD a decade ago because the sysadmin side was so far behind Debian (which, to be fair, was true of almost everything else) with update reliability, speed, etc. What's it like in the modern era?
That said, you can still build and distribute custom packages---the biggest strength of the FreeBSD Ports tree compared to other distributions, in my opinion. This too has improved with the introduction of the OPTIONSNG framework and the Poudriere build system. It used to be that you had to manually run "make config" per port or to somehow shoehorn per-port options into /etc/make.conf. All of that's been replaced with a much more sensible way to configure the port build process. For example, the following sets the default versions of Perl and Apache to pull in as dependencies (if needed by the port), and then it configures several ports:
WITH_OPENSSL_PORT=YES
DEFAULT_VERSIONS= perl5=5.18 apache=2.4
ca_root_nss_SET= ETCSYMLINK
moreutils_UNSET= MANPAGES
Nowadays, I only need to use portsnap/portupgrade when bootstrapping my Poudriere deployment.
The nice thing is how well you can mix and match ports (source based management, in case you weren't aware) with the binary packages. And FreeBSD ports are surprisingly easy to manage too.
It's also worth mentioning that FreeBSD runs circles around a lot Linux distributions when it comes to upgrading. There's a tool, literally called freebsd-update, which is the equivalent of apt-get dist-upgrade and makes the whole process so painless you could be forgiven for thinking you were running a rolling release OS.
It's been ages since I've used FreeBSD, but I have fond memories of using portupgrade (and portinstall, which comes with it) to manage source-based ports. It's probably faster to do make && make install instead, but the automation from portupgrade is useful and the -c/-C options can be helpful, as is its control over when to clean the package build dir.
I sort of grew up with the BSDs as my first introduction to a Unix-like environment, and in all honesty it was the reason I first migrated to Gentoo when I started using Linux (the Gentoo way was more familiar). I now use Arch for personal use (and Ubuntu for services), but I think the FreeBSD philosophy is in many ways superior. Clunky, perhaps, but usually void of unnecessary complexity.
You don't expect someone to be able to write a full-featured bug-free package manager equivalent to those that have matured over a decade in under a two years do you? What't they've done so far is beyond impressive and at this pace it will be improved beyond the competition within 3 years.
All I was just trying to give a balanced opinion but it seems you can't post anything on here these days without someone finding criticism. {sigh}
Well, you kind of would, wouldn't you? It seems that this should be a well-understood problem these days, at least unless you're going to do something wildly experimental like Nix. Maybe this says more about the archaic languages and systems we're still, though.
(Not that I know much about 'pkg' specifically. What does it do that's different from every other mainstream package manager out there? Why not use APT, for example? Since Debian has a FreeBSD flavour, presumably APT should be able to run without too much tweaking.)
Btw, I would completely disagree that the sysadmin side is or was behind Debian. FreeBSD is way easier to sysadmin than most Linux, even without pkg.
This may be true now but it certainly wasn't the case in the early 2000s. When we switched, our number of systems went up by an order of magnitude (100s) but the amount of sysadmin time required actually went down. Consistent package management and debconf were most of the reason.
At an implementation level the packaging system is still made of twine - Ruby scripts that call Makefiles are not my idea of robust engineering. But I've gradually come to accept that, just like the project's continued use of CVS, they've managed to make it work.
The FreeBSD Project might still maintain a CVS repository, but all development's been moved to Subversion. Or if Git is your thing, they have some kind of synchronization set up with https://github.com/freebsd/freebsd.