Shots 1 and 2: I forced a series of errors by running pkbasify (in Konsole, alongside various other applications) with insufficient free memory and insufficient swap space.
Shots 3 and 4: the second run completed without error.
Cool.
<https://github.com/ifreund/pkgbasify?tab=readme-ov-file#pkgbasify>
– convert a FreeBSD system to use pkgbase.
Thanks to Isaac Freund @ifreund and the FreeBSD Foundation @FreeBSDFoundation