As some have noticed, we’ve changed the build system for pfSense® such that the very need for the pfsense-tools repo has been removed.

While the pfsense-tools repo still exists, it’s not used for pfSense version 2.3 and later.

The former structure, where a set of discrete patches were kept against a given version of the FreeBSD source and ports trees, has now been replaced by a system where those patches are kept on a vendor branch of these trees. This improves both the process of bringing new versions of FreeBSD and ports to pfSense and the process of upstreaming changes we make to these. By upstreaming, we make both FreeBSD and pfSense better.

These changes have been a long-time coming. There has been sustained effort toward this type of setup since September 2012.

There are still many parts of the build scripts that need to change, and we will continue to improve these, along with the rest of pfSense software. As one example of where we’re headed, after base-as-pkg is done in FreeBSD 11, with only a few more changes on our tree, we should be able to build pfSense using only the build tools from FreeBSD.