pkgin 0.4.0

After a year of PR's, feedbacks and various fixes, pkgin 0.4.0 is now available and its package, pkgtools/pkgin is up-to-date.

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pkgsrcCon 2010 - More Than pkgsrc

pkgsrcCon 2010, the technical conference for people working on pkgsrc, took place may 28 - 30 at the Departement Informatik, University of Basel, Switzerland. Packed with interesting talks and in-depth discussions about the matter, the confence was a great success.

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The pkgsrc-2010Q1 Release

The pkgsrc developers are happy to announce the new pkgsrc-2010Q1 release, which has support for even more packages than previous releases. Some major packages have also been updated in this release.

At the same time, the pkgsrc-2009Q4 release has been deprecated, and continuing engineering starts on the pkgsrc-2010Q1 release.

Some highlights of the new pkgsrc-2010Q1 release are:

• we have almost finished the transition to DESTDIR installation, where a staging directory is used to make a binary package, which is then managed by the pkg_install tools
• gnome has been updated to version 2.28.1, kde to 4.3.5
• we have started changing packages to default to KDE4 instead of KDE3. For now, the old packages are still available as *-kde3 e.g. amarok is the KDE4 package, and amarok-kde3 is the KDE3 one.
• the default python package is now python26
• squid 3.1.1 is now in pkgsrc, with some support for IPv6
• php 5.3.x has been added
• The conversion from the last teTeX distribution to texlive (currently 2009) is still in progress.
• many, many packages have been updated to newer versions, to take advantage of fixes and improved functionality. The following versions of packages are included in the
  pkgsrc-2010Q1 release:
  • apache-2.2.15
  • bzr-2.0.3
  • firefox-3.6.3
  • git-1.6.6.2 (the package is known as scmgit in pkgsrc)
  • gnome-2.28.1
  • kde-4.3.5
  • mercurial-1.5.1
  • mysql-5.1.44nb2
  • openoffice-3.1.1 and openoffice-bin-3.2.0
  • perl-5.10.1
  • postgresql-8.3.9nb2 and postgresql-8.4.2
  • python-2.5.4nb5 and python-2.6.4nb4
  • ruby-1.8.7.174nb4
  • samba-3.3.12
  • seamonkey-2.0.4
  • subversion-1.6.9nb1
  • wireshark-1.2.7
  • zope-3.3.1
• other notable changes include
  • we bid a fond thanks, and farewell, to some old favourites, such as php4 and related packages, the old vmware modules packages, sun's jdk and jre versions 1.4 and 1.5, the ISC dhcp 3.x packages, galeon, swing, typolight-2.6 and tcl-8.3
  • the addition of some interesting, pertinent, and shiny packages such as tn3270 (:-) - brought over from NetBSD's src archive), mingw, colordiff, easygit, monotone-el, swt, fuse-bindfs, php-5.3, samba-3.3, xymon, musca, and qt4-mng
  • notable updates to packages such as bsd and gnu tar, amarok, lame, mpg123, mysql, openldap, postgresql, sqlite, boehm-gc, boost, doxygen, fossil, glib, libev, libffi, memcached, nspr, nss, pango, pcre, rt3, readline, swig, xulrunner, vim, qemu, chicken, mono, parrot, openjdk7, python, php5, squeak, clamav, dovecot, fetchmail, getmail, gmime, linmilter, mew, sendmail, spamassassin, squirrelmail, thunderbird, octave, pari, calibre, dhcpcd, gupnp, nmap, rdist6, rsync, rtorrent, tnftpd, tor, transmission, unbound, aide, netpgp, openssl, bash, osh, tcsh, bacula, cdrtools, memtester, grub, pstree, rasqal, openbox, firefox, ikiwiki, lighttpd, mediawiki, nginx, squid, seamonkey, typolight, gtk2, xsnow
• the Package of the Quarter award is hereby awarded to qemu, nominated by Joerg Sonnenberger, and samba33, nominated by Matthias Scheler.

The list of platforms supported by pkgsrc is AIX, BSD/OS, Darwin (Mac OS X), DragonFly BSD, FreeBSD, HP/UX, IRIX, Interix, Linux, NetBSD, OSF1, OpenBSD, QNX and SunOS (Solaris). Haiku support is almost ready to be added to pkgsrc. We are aware that support for some platforms is at a more mature stage than others, and would like to encourage feedback from users and developers on our more esoteric platforms.

• continuing engineering on the "stable" releases of pkgsrc continues to work well, and our release engineering team has done a marvelous job in pulling up changes to the stable release. Our thanks go to Matthias Scheler, Lubomir Sedlacik, Tyler Retzlaff, and S.P.Zeidler for all the hard work they do in sanity checking pullup requests, and managing the stable releases in pkgsrc.
• constant bulk building on a number of platforms has improved our ability to identify potential areas of concern, and to correct them sooner. It has also improved our ability to make binary packages available, and we are working on ways to improve this further. For more information, please refer to the pkgsrc-bulk mailing list, archives available at http://mail-index.netbsd.org/pkgsrc-bulk/
• the number of packages has grown from 9100 to 9315; the number of supported platforms is currently 14. NetBSD, on all its supported architectures, is considered to be one pkgsrc platform.

As always, we'd like to encourage users of the packages collection to audit for security problems at least every day using pkg_admin audit - this will provide notification of any packages which are vulnerable to exploit. pkg_admin is part of the pkg_install tools.

The pkgsrc-security team do a marvelous job in tracking notifications of vulnerabilities in packages, and disseminating this information, and our sincere thanks go to them for this essential work.

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.

The source tar files for the new release can be found at:

ftp://ftp.NetBSD.org/pub/pkgsrc/pkgsrc-2010Q1/pkgsrc.tar.gz
or

ftp://ftp.NetBSD.org/pub/pkgsrc/pkgsrc-2010Q1/pkgsrc.tar.bz2

You can also use the pkgsrc-2010Q1 tag to check it out yourself from anoncvs.NetBSD.org or any of the mirrors.

Alistair Crooks
On behalf of the pkgsrc developers

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pkgsrc, Solaris, and 5000 binary packages

Jonathan Perkin has posted an interesting blog entry entitled "apt-get" and 5,000 packages for Solaris10/x86 about using pkgsrc and the binary package manager pkgin on Solaris 10/x86. In pkgsrc, we can get conditioned to the fact that package management, in a coherent, well-controlled way; it's nice to see this gaining further traction in Solaris circles too.

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pkgin, a tool to manage pkgsrc binary packages

From the day I began using NetBSD I felt that there was a need for a binary package manager. pkgsrc is great of course, I use it, love it and contribute to, but I'm not brave enough to build my entire environment with it. Of course the esteemed pkg_add(1) and pkg_delete(1) can handle binary packages installation, but when it comes to upgrades, binary packages manipulation is far from being straightforward.

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Pkgsrc-2009Q1 has been branched

Just a quick note to say that pkgsrc has been branched for pkgsrc-2009Q1, and has already had some pullups - thanks to the pkgsrc-releng folks.

We're going to sort out the release announcement now, and get that out around the same time as the binary packages get built.

Thanks to all involved in making this branch happen.

Enjoy pkgsrc-2009Q1, folks!

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Pkgsrc-2009Q1 Freeze starts on March 22nd, 23:59 UTC

In preparation for the pkgsrc-2009Q1 branch, pkgsrc will be frozen for new packages and infrastructure changes, starting on Sunday March 22nd, at 23:59 UTC.

Some background to our freezes: pkgsrc makes four releases a year, named after the quarter in which all the work took place, and the quarter in which the packages themselves could last have been updated. The release name is thus 2009Q1, 2009Q2, etc. So that we can stabilise packages before the branch is created, we institute a freeze on new functionality - no new packages, and the infrastructure itself does not get changed. This means that we can take a look at the results of bulk build runs, and fix up any loose ends in the packages themselves, without having to worry about the basic building blocks of pkgsrc changing from under us - we have a stable platform to build upon.

It always happens that third party software vendors want to release a new version of their software just after we've entered the freeze. When that happens, we ask the pkgsrc developers to make a judgement call on it - they are the ones who will be maintaining this, after all - and if they think it needs to be updated, we ask them to get approval from the pkgsrc PMC. Again, to minimise the effect on other packages, we like to limit this to leaf packages. These are packages which can be changed easily with no consequences - packages which are not pre-requisites for any other package.

In general, pkgsrc tries to be conservative without being out of date in the versions of the packages. Trying to stay on the bleeding edge may be great fun at times, and does ensure early access to new features, but there are consequences for others in the stability of such packages. We have some packages which are maintained like this - usually, they have a -devel suffix - but the vast majority of packages are known to be good versions. We know, because we run those versions ourselves.

So what does pkgsrc-2009Q1 have in store for us? New pkg_install tools, speedups for the buildlink3 infrastructure, gnome 2.26, and many more things.

Look for pkgsrc-2009Q1 coming to a repository near you in a couple of weeks time.

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German Perlworkshop and a NetBSD related presentation

I attended the German Perlworkshop from 25th February to 27th February in Frankfurt. The German Perlworkshop follows the tradition of the YAPC conferences. It's listed on their webpage, however the name has been changed to represent the German localisation.

I gave two presentations about the different usage of Perl, one was related to the NetBSD project. I maintain quite a lot of Perl packages inside the pkgsrc repository and run our Perl package update list, too. As I encounter frequent problems with our Perl modules, like missing ChangeLogs, incorrect version numbering for pkgsrc, broken dependencies, etc I decided to give a talk about these problems. It's called "Maintaining the be*st" and it deals with some of the different aspects in maintaining Perl packages for pkgsrc. I translated the slides to English, so all the English readers of this blog are able to read them. The audio recording was done during the presentation, however, it is in German.

• Maintaining the best (German|PDF)
• Maintaining the best (English|PDF)
• Maintaining the best (Audio recording in German|MP3 ~21mb)
• Reverse Testing (German|PDF)
• Reverse Testing (English|PDF)
• Reverse Testing (Audio recording in German|MP3 ~9mb)

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