Re: how to upgrade a whole machine ...

["Jeremy C. Reed" <reed%reedmedia.net@localhost>]

> This has probably been suggested before, but... It sounds as though the
> versions of pkg_* tools bundled with NetBSD should be changed to use a
> wrapper, in much the same way that /usr/sbin/sendmail is actually a link
> to mailwraper(8), which consults mailer.conf(5) to decide which flavour
> of sendmail to invoke.  Then, when you want to upgrade your pkg_* tools
> from the ancient ones shipped with the OS release to the modern ones in
> pkgsrc, you simply install the new versions from pkgsrc and edit the
> relevant .conf file to point to them.

That wrapper config seems to imply the admin has a choice. But would they 
ever go back to using system supplied version?

Some other options are:

- pkgsrc install direct to /usr/sbin/pkg* (which end up getting 
overwritten by system upgrades).

- Get rid of /usr/sbin/pkg_* and only use /usr/pkg/sbin/pkg_*. But bad 
idea for those who like to rm -rf /usr/pkg/

- Simple script in base system to fetch and install pkg_install package. 
Script could extract it, then run that extracted part to install itself.