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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