Category: pkgsrc

The latest quarterly release of pkgsrc is out, and here’s the announcement.  Start your somewhat difficult upgrade process now!

Hubert Feyrer posted a link to his summation of the Google Summer of Code projects for NetBSD.   Included is a description of DragonFly (and pkgsrc) developer Joerg Sonnenberger’s pkg_install work.

Joerg Sonnenberger’s getting rid of the compiled-on-DragonFly-1.4 pkgsrc binaries; building from source should still work, but an upgrade to 1.6 is probably a good idea anyway.

Some packages are going to be removed from pkgsrc in the next release.  Maybe XFree86 too.

Joerg Sonnenberger has uploaded the full set of pkgsrc binary packages for pkgsrc-2006Q3 to his site.  (See the earlier message for the link.)  Please test, especially if you are a KDE or GNOME user.

Something I knew:  You can set the environment variable PKG_PATH to the URL where binary pkgsrc packages are located, and pkg_add will automatically fetch from there.

Something I didn’t know: you can have multiple sites listed, as Petr Janda explains.

pkgsrc.dragonflybsd.org is a new, much-easier-to-remember CNAME for Joerg Sonnenberger’s packages.stura.uni-rostock.de binary pkgsrc package site for DragonFly.

Hubert Feyrer put together an interesting chart that shows the Makefile dependencies in pkgsrc.  I’ve always wondered how people make directional charts from text data like that…

I’ve updated the Handbook, and rebuilt the web version and the PDF.  Most of the changes are the addition of Adrian Nida and Erik Wikstrom’s updates for pkgsrc.

To continue today’s all-pkgsrc day, Joerg Sonnenberger has the binaries for the 2006Q2 release of pkgsrc, built for DragonFly, available at:

ftp://packages.stura.uni-rostock.de/pkgsrc-stable/DragonFly/RELEASE/i386

(See message here) For those who don’t know it, the quarterly releases of pkgsrc are ‘known good’ releases, where all dependencies are up to date for that time, and only security updates are made to those releases. In other words, it’s like a ‘stable’ branch of pkgsrc.

Set PKG_PATH to the above URL + “/All” to be able to automatically install from that binary collection with pkg_add. If you want to upgrade, the quickest way to do so may be this strategy I thought up.

Note that packages that have known security problems at release time are not found in /All, but rather in /vulnerable. This includes Firefox!

Joerg Sonnenberger has a Google Summer of Code project, improving pkgsrc’s pkg_install. He recently posted to tech-pkg@netbsd.org with a summary of progress.

The 2006Q2 version of pkgsrc is out, with a good number of updates. The announcement contains, among other things, the total packages in pkgsrc (6,110), supported platforms (12), and several mentions of how many more packages are compiling now on DragonFly thanks to Joerg Sonnenberger.

Dmitri Nikulin has a quick tip on how to remove some package dependencies in pkgsrc, in the (rare) chance that you don’t want and don’t need certain other programs.

Pkgsrc has regular quarterly releases, and the one for the second quarter of 2006 is starting up.  These releases are designed to provide known stable points, or at least points more stable than pulling from CVS.

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.