Running pkgbasify in a jail

[dlangille]

Tonight I downloaded and ran pkgbasify in a FreeBSD 15.0 jail. It failed, but the jail seems OK.

The first issue:

[empty.int.unixathome.org] [312/312] Fetching FreeBSD-ctf-dev-15.0: 100%   138 KiB 141.6 kB/s    00:01    
Checking integrity... done (0 conflicting)
pkg: Package FreeBSD-cron has files with flags that cannot be managed in this jail. Set allow.chflags in the jail configuration.
Fetching packages failed, try again? (y/n) 

I stopped there, added alllow.chflags; to the jail configuration, and restarted the jail.

The next attempt:

[0:03 empty root ~] # ./pkgbasify.lua 
..
[empty.int.unixathome.org] [ 20/312] Extracting FreeBSD-bootloader-15.0:   9%
pkg: openat(boot/device.hints): No such file or directory
[empty.int.unixathome.org] [ 20/312] Extracting FreeBSD-bootloader-15.0: 100%
...
[empty.int.unixathome.org] [ 32/312] Extracting FreeBSD-clibs-15.0p11: 100%
Cannot install /lib/libc.so.7, installed as /lib/libc.so.7.pkgnew
pkg: Failed to chflags /lib/libc.so.7:Operation not permitted
Error: exit

Restarting the jail with securelevel = -1 and running pkgbasify again, the Cannot install /lib/libc.so.7 error did not occur and the conversion seemed to complete smoothly:

Links to more information:

• outline of what was done with error messages: https://dan.langille.org/2026/06/30/running-pkgbasify-on-a-freebsd-15-0-jail/
• full gist of 1st update: https://gist.github.com/dlangille/1d8b6d1cf47c3e372aa19dcf5bdef018
• 2nd update: https://gist.github.com/dlangille/9abacd12aca5640bf602211b943a25fc