iocage: funcionality and use of basejails

[twllnbrck]

Hey folks,

I'm in the process of setting up some jails for my desktop (e.g. browsers, mail-clients,...).
Since I'm not so familiar with jails I started with the basics and created some test jails with bsdinstall(8) jail on zfs. So far so good. Since I'm rather lazy I was looking at jail management tools and stumbled over sysutils/ezjail and sysutils/iocage. As iocage is designed for zfs and comes with snapshots, cloning, automatic package installation etc I decided to go with it.
Installation was very easy and documentation is good for most uses (shared IP, templates) but I wasn't able to figure out how sysutils/iocage basejails are working. The only thing I know is that they exist and can be created with the -b option.
(I know I can create basejail behaviour manually with zfs clone and seperate home, tmp and var datasets. But that's not an option in the long term cause I want to minimize efforts with jail managment)

So does anyone have experience with iocage basejails? How do they work, what do they provide and share with other jails and how to create jails based on them?
Thanks for all answers, hints and suggestions!