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Naive question: does the pkg(7) format used by FreeBSD have anything to do with the .pkg files Apple distributes? And if not, why not try to be "OSX native" using .pkg files instead of "BSD native" using pkg(7)?


FreeBSD's binary packages aren't .pkg, but rather .txz (.tar + .xz).

http://pkg.freebsd.org/freebsd:10:x86:64/latest/All/2bsd-dif...:

  -rw-r--r--  1 root     wheel          626 Dec 31  1969 +COMPACT_MANIFEST
  -rw-r--r--  1 root     wheel          921 Dec 31  1969 +MANIFEST
  tar: Removing leading / from absolute path names in the archive
  -r-xr-xr-x  1 root     wheel        30616 Oct  3 10:49 usr/local/bin/2diff
  -r-xr-xr-x  1 root     wheel        11256 Oct  3 10:49 usr/local/libexec/2diffh
  -r--r--r--  1 root     wheel         2823 Oct  3 10:49 usr/local/man/man1/2diff.1.gz
This is similar to other BSD binary package formats.


No, Apple's .pkg files are proprietary to Apple's Installer.app. They are XAR archives containing metadata generated by the package creation GUI.


It goes back to the NextStep days too.




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