It’s the 10 year anniversary of pkgsrc, and to celebrate, netbsd.org has a page with some history and a large variety of interviews with various people involved with it in one way or another, including folks in other BSD projects that were influenced by this work. (Thanks, Joerg Sonnenberger and Mark Weinem for the heads-up)
The pkgsrc system will be changing how it lets you limit software installation by license. Right now, any open source license is considered acceptable; this change will make that more granular. Default behavior seems to be unchanged, so this should at least not cause a problem in terms of usage.
The most recent quarterly release of pkgsrc is out; I’m building packages now on pkgbox.dragonflybsd.org and a full set of binaries should be available in about a week. (That’s how long it takes to build all 7,000 or so packages, even on good hardware…)
Klaus Heinz is looking for Nagios plugin users on DragonFly, among other systems, for testing the newest versions. Be warned: Geert Hendrickx discovered a bug that affects NetBSD and probably also DragonFly in the latest version of Nagios. There’s a fix listed, and should hopefully be updated before it hits pkgsrc.
I posted my most recent results from a bulk build of pkgsrc; I’m planning to follow the quarterly release branches of pkgsrc.
I recently completed a bulk build of pkgsrc using Joerg Sonnenberger’s pbulk tool; there has been discussion of using these packages as part of a mirroring system (poke around the thread for more.)
The freeze period (where only bugfixes are committed) for the next quarterly release of pkgsrc starts tomorrow. Interestingly, this next quarter’s release marks 10 years of pkgsrc.
There’s an effort to make the ‘official’ pkgsrc logo happen; previous discussion was described here. It looks like the simple version is the candidate; there’s a fun, alternate version that unfortunately won’t reproduce well.
Hasso Tepper has a patch that appears to fix net-snmp; it can be downloaded for someone who needs SNMP now, and it should hopefully be integrated into pkgsrc soon.
In a recent post on users@, Michael Neumann wondered if it was possible to have the pkgsrc tools install binary packages whenever available, building from source only when needed. Going by Joerg Sonnenberger’s reply, yes it is:
DEPENDS_TARGET=bin-install
Set BINPKG_SITES similiar to PKG_PATH first.
BINPKG_SITES should be set to a list of binary package locations, separated by semicolons, as I recall – see the download page on the DragonFly website for a list.
‘elekktretterr’ posted his extra steps needed to get spamd running, from pkgsrc.
xorg 6.9 is going to be removed from pkgsrc soon; upgrade to the modular version when the chance presents itself. As the linked post says, you need these packages:
- meta-pkgs/modular-xorg-apps
- meta-pkgs/modular-xorg-fonts
- meta-pkgs/modular-xorg-drivers
- x11/modular-xorg-server
- x11/xterm
(Though xterm can be replaced with other terminal programs) All these are available as packages from your local mirror, though programs dependent on X will need to be recompiled or reinstalled from binary packages.
Seen on pkgsrc-users@netbsd.org: Steven O’Hara-Smith fixed Linux emulation support with pkgsrc and DragonFly. Thanks, Steven.
It’s not an earthshaking change, of course, but I like to give credit for things that otherwise would pass unnoticed.
Dieter Baron wrote up a list of possible pkgsrc improvements on the tech-pkg@netbsd.org mailing list; it’s a list of goals that have been talked about in fragments other places. Much discussion ensued, with Joerg Sonnenberger pointing out that some of these goals are near completion.
Joerg Sonnenberger posted to the tech-pkg@netbsd.org mailing list the idea that there should be a bare minimum level defined to call a hardware/software system supported under pkgsrc. Much discussion ensued. (Happily, DragonFly is quite well supported by any criterion.)
Recent discussion on the tech-pkg@netbsd.org list has led to another possible pkgsrc logo – this time, one you could print out and use to construct a small cube.
Speaking of logos, why hasn’t this one been chosen for pkgsrc yet?
Joerg Sonnenberger has built binary packages from the recent 2007Q2 release of pkgsrc; the “stable” directory will be changed to point there. In fact, it may be a good idea to stick with that version for the next little while.
Incidentally, there has been some name changes in the Apache 2.2 modules. You will know if this matters to you.
The pkgsrc release for the second quarter of 2007 is now available. Update, if you are following the regular branches with your /usr/pkgsrc.
Because my timing is awesome, I wrote an entry about Joerg Sonnenberger’s new pbulk system just as the computer hosting it went down. It’s back up, so, go back to the original entry if you missed the original output from that bulk build.