this should be FreeBSD-*, there are no pkgbase packages whose names start with FreeBSD-base-.

also, you might need -f here, at least if you have ports installed, because of dependency issues.

don't use > as this will overwrite the contents of any existing file the user might have created. also, bsdinstall creates its own file called FreeBSD-base.conf, which is the one you'd want to change.

i suggest replacing this with prose: in most cases, /usr/local/etc/pkg/repos/FreeBSD-base.conf can simply be deleted, since the base repository is disabled by default in /etc/pkg/FreeBSD.conf.

this should not be necessary since pkg shouldn't remove itself. that would only happen if you did pkg unregister -a.

concur with @ivy + would add pkg remove FreeBSD-src-\* as a first step since presumably they're going to git clone it instead. Oh, and asterisks need to be escaped.

also also, you need quotes here: pkg unregister 'FreeBSD-*', to prevent the shell doing glob expansion.

my last comment crossed with yours, ofc using \* is also fine.

the two packages we want to remove here are FreeBSD-src and FreeBSD-src-sys.

Are these normally marked vital if installed? If so, you need -f to remove them.

It's not clear what "De-pkgbasify" means -- the "pkgbase" short name does not appear anywhere in this page prior to this change, and this doesn't explain what effect this command will have on the system. The user might think it's going to remove their base system packages.

Maybe something like "Remove base system pkg(8) metadata, for use with ..."

We could also mention that it can be done for building from src or use with freebsd-update.

Or "Delete src packages and remove base system metadata for the remaining packages"

no, but FreeBSD-set-src is, which i forgot about. so to remove all three we'd need -f. it might be easier to just tell the user to unregister everything then delete /usr/src if they want to clone it...

i'm still not sure this makes sense because you'll end up with a file containing

FreeBSD-base: { enabled: yes }
FreeBSD-base: { enabled: no }

which is strange and confusing. it's better to explain that the user should disable the base repository, e.g. by removing this file, so it's clear why we're doing this.

I am open to concrete suggestions to improve this, but we should have working examples. The example should be explained well enough to understand what's going on. I do not want to implement that change because I want to have working examples.

I am open to concrete suggestions to improve this,

i doubt this, because i suggested several and your response was "this is out of scope" (because we can't have prose in EXAMPLES, or something). so whatever.

the user may have an existing FreeBSD.conf, especially if they upgraded from 14.x or earlier. i suggest not recommend to unconditionally overwrite this.

this is not correct if the existing system doesn't match the pkg repository (e.g., src.conf differences). converting an existing system to pkgbase is a rather complicated process and i'm not sure this should be documented in the manpage at all... it might make more sense to include this in the 16.0 release notes, assuming we drop freebsd-update at that time.

it's not, pkg unregister is fully supported.

do they? why? i thought this had been fixed by making pkg case sensitive by default.

would rather say something like "via make installworld". you can upgrade pkgbase systems from source without depkgbasifying them.

again, the user may have existing content in this file that we can't just unconditionally delete.

I assume you mean by building packages from that source and installing them? Good point, "upgrade in-place via source" does not need to imply installworld.

yes, precisely that.