Category: pkgsrc

Let’s say you want to identify the pkgsrc packages on your system that are ‘leaves’, meaning no other packages are dependent on them.  Johnny Lam, on the pkgsrc-users@ mailing list, has a short script to find just that.

I did not realize this, but if you want to browse SMB shares using KDE, KDE has to be compiled explicitly with support for it. The message linked happens to cover ‘show-options’, a handy pkgsrc option.

Joerg Sonnenberger’s been building from the most recent branch (2006Q1) of pkgsrc, and the binaries are now available.  His existing packages were built from the current version of pkgsrc, i.e. from CVS.

Joerg Sonnenberger is removing old versions of postgres from pkgsrc, and reconfiguring the PHP, PEAR, and Apache packages to make the installable combinations a little more comprehensible.

If you use the OpenLDAP package(s) in pkgsrc, it’s undergone some changes that affect it and its dependencies.

The different Summer of Code projects for NetBSD have been posted.  Since pkgsrc and NetBSD are still pretty intertwined, there’s pkgsrc-related work in there, and one of them is an improvement of pkg_install, by DragonFly developer (and package-building pro) Joerg Sonnenberger.

Something I haven’t seen in a new article recently: a comparison of FreeBSD ports, NetBSD (and DragonFly, and others) pkgsrc, and OpenBSD ports.  A light article, as these often tend to be.  (Thanks, Hubert Feyrer.)

Joerg Sonnenberger presented at PkgSrcCon 2006 about his experiences bringing pkgsrc to DragonFly.  The slides from his presentation are available now, along with all the others.

Because of recent changes to the Java licensing scheme, it’s now possible to include Java as part of a packaging system.  It’s available now for pkgsrc, for some versions of NetBSD.  Other pkgsrc platforms (like DragonFly) will probably follow suit.

One of the proposed projects for Google’s Summer of Code 2006 is a rewrite of pkg_install, which encompasses the various utility programs used for pkgsrc. The proposal is by Joerg Sonnenberger, who has commit access to both DragonFly and pkgsrc, and has made an astounding quantity of packages work on DragonFly.

PkgSrcCon number 3, a technical conference for users/developers of pkgsrc, will be held in Paris, France, May 5-7.  That means it starts today!

Some relative stats on how platforms are doing with pkgsrc; results found in recent entries to the pkgsrc-bulk mailing list.

NetBSD 3.0_STABLE/i386 96%
NetBSD 3.99.18/i386 94%
NetBSD 2.1/i386 92%
NetBSD 1.6.2/i386 92%
DragonFly/i386 90%
NetBSD 3.0/x86_64 87%
NetBSD 2.1/sparc 82%
Darwin 8.5.0/powerpc 60%
IRIX64 6.5/mipseb 31%

DragonFly appears to be the best place to run pkgsrc, if you aren’t running NetBSD.

pkgsrc has reached 6,000 total packages.  How many of those build on DragonFly?  About 93%.  For comparison, pkgsrc builds about 97% of all packages on NetBSD 3.0_STABLE, which is possibly the most common platform using pkgsrc.  That’s fantastic statistics.

Joerg Sonnenberger followed up on the pkgsrc bug reports, noting that checking recent bulk builds (via the pkgsrc-bulk mailing list) is another way to check up on pkgsrc problems.

If you’ve ever been curious about how to report DragonFly issues to people outside of DragonFly; here’s the process.  (DragonFly mailing lists are also a good alternative.)

One of the issues with pkgsrc is that it is difficult to upgrade all packages with minimal downtime. However, as long as you are sticking to prebuilt binaries, it’s possible to get it to happen rather quickly.

Joerg Sonnenberger’s bulk builds of pkgsrc are showing that almost everything in pkgsrc now builds on DragonFly.   That’s 92% complete.

I can’t find the original post, but apparently pkg_install no longer complains about minor changes in system name, which can affect anyone installing binary packages.

Joerg Sonnenberger forwarded along the announcement that the first quarterly release of pkgsrc for 2006 is out. Notably, there’s nearly 6,000 packages, and these two interesting tips:

As always, we’d like to encourage users of the packages collection to install and run pkgsrc/security/audit-packages at least every day – this will provide notification of any packages which are vulnerable to exploit.

We’d also really appreciate it if people would install the pkgsrc/pkgtools/pkgsurvey package, and then run the pkgsurvey script for us. This will forward us a list of the packages installed on that machine, and the operating system and release level of the operating system. The results will be kept confidential, but the output will help us analyse the packages that are most used.

Joerg Sonnenberger, who has been fixing a ridiculous number of pkgsrc packages to run on DragonFly, is giving a presentation at PkgSrcCon.  The convention is happening May 5-7, in Paris.  The registration deadline is April 15th, by the way.