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Comment by zdw | Hacker News Reader

The downside of this is that OpenBSD is pretty difficult to upgrade in a clean manner given it's "uncompress the tarball over /, then clean stuff up manually" method.

I really like OpenBSD, but it desperately needs a modern package management system. This is frankly my largest sticking point with it - it's faster and much cleaner in most cases to wipe, reinstall, then apply configuration than to try to upgrade.

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This is oft-repeated, but how is OpenBSD's package management system "not modern"? It handles upgrades properly, modified configuration in /etc is preserved. Packages are cryptographically signed as of 5.5, files are individually checksummed..

I'd say OpenBSD still handles dependencies and upgrades better than FreeBSD's supposedly "next-generation" pkg.

OpenBSD's package system and ports tree are tightly integrated and work together, and despite the historic naming, OpenBSD's pkg_{add,delete,info,create}(1) are unrelated to the now deprecated FreeBSD equivalents.

Package management in OpenBSD is as good or better than any other distro I've used.

Upgrades are: boot bsd.rd, upgrade. Then run sysmerge, and pkg_add -u

As someone who used to help maintain hundreds of OpenBSD boxes, yes.

But don't forget, OpenBSD is designed for the developers.

The recommended and supported way of upgrading the base system is to boot a bsd.rd kernel and type 'U'. If you don't have a console, the manual upgrade guide on the website is an added convenience.

How about debian with freebsd kernel?

The new pkg tool in freebsd is pretty good and meshes nicely with the ports tree. The marginal improvements for 3rd-party built packages with apt aren't really worth getting rid of the rest of freebsd for. It also doesn't help OpenBSD, which really needs a new package manager.

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