Before you download and extract the files, you need to decide where you want to extract them. When using pkgsrc as root user, pkgsrc is usually installed in /usr/pkgsrc. You are though free to install the sources and binary packages wherever you want in your filesystem, provided that the pathname does not contain white-space or other characters that are interpreted specially by the shell and some other programs. A safe bet is to use only letters, digits, underscores and dashes. Before you download any pkgsrc files, you should decide whether you want the current branch or the stable branch. The latter is forked on a quarterly basis from the current branch and only gets modified for security updates. The names of the stable branches are built from the year and the quarter, for example 2009Q1. The second step is to decide how you want to download pkgsrc. You can get it as a tar file, via SUP, or via CVS. All three ways are described here. The primary download location for all pkgsrc files is . There are a number of subdirectories for different purposes, which are described in detail in . The tar file for the current branch is in the directory current and is called pkgsrc.tar.gz. It is autogenerated daily. The tar file for the stable branch 2009Q1 is in the directory pkgsrc-2009Q1 and is also called pkgsrc-2009Q1.tar.gz. To download a pkgsrc stable tarball, run: &uprompt; ftp ftp://ftp.NetBSD.org/pub/pkgsrc/pkgsrc-20xxQy/pkgsrc-20xxQy.tar.gz Where pkgsrc-20xxQy is the stable branch to be downloaded, for example, pkgsrc-2009Q1. Then, extract it with: &uprompt; tar -xzf pkgsrc-20xxQy.tar.gz -C /usr This will create the directory pkgsrc/ in /usr/ and all the package source will be stored under /usr/pkgsrc/. To download pkgsrc-current, run: &uprompt; ftp ftp://ftp.NetBSD.org/pub/pkgsrc/current/pkgsrc.tar.gz As an alternative to the tar file, you can get pkgsrc via the Software Update Protocol, SUP. To do so, make sure your supfile has a line release=pkgsrc in it, see the examples in /usr/share/examples/supfiles, and that the /usr/pkgsrc directory exists. Then, simply run: &uprompt; sup -v /path/to/your/supfile. To do an initial (full) checkout of pkgsrc, you first have to set some environment variables. For the C-Shell, type: &cprompt; setenv CVSROOT anoncvs@anoncvs.NetBSD.org:/cvsroot &cprompt; setenv CVS_RSH ssh Or, the same for the bourne shell: &uprompt; export CVSROOT="anoncvs@anoncvs.NetBSD.org:/cvsroot" &uprompt; export CVS_RSH="ssh" By default, CVS doesn't do things like most people would expect it to do. But there is a way to convince CVS, by creating a file called .cvsrc in your home directory and saving the following lines to it. This file will save you lots of headache and some bug reports, so we strongly recommend it. You can find an explanation of this file in the CVS documentation. # recommended CVS configuration file from the pkgsrc guide checkout -P update -dP release -d diff -upN cvs -q -z3 rdiff -u To fetch a specific pkgsrc stable branch from scratch, run: &uprompt; cd /usr &uprompt; cvs checkout -r pkgsrc-20xxQy -P pkgsrc Where pkgsrc-20xxQy is the stable branch to be checked out, for example, pkgsrc-2009Q1 This will create the directory pkgsrc/ in your /usr/ directory and all the package source will be stored under /usr/pkgsrc/. To fetch the pkgsrc current branch, run: &uprompt; cd /usr &uprompt; cvs checkout -P pkgsrc The preferred way to keep pkgsrc up-to-date is via CVS (which also works if you have first installed it via a tar file). It saves bandwidth and hard disk activity, compared to downloading the tar file again. When updating from a tar file, you first need to completely remove the old pkgsrc directory. Otherwise those files that have been removed from pkgsrc in the mean time will not be removed on your local disk, resulting in inconsistencies. When removing the old files, any changes that you have done to the pkgsrc files will be lost after updating. Therefore updating via CVS is strongly recommended. Note that by default the distfiles and the binary packages are saved in the pkgsrc tree, so don't forget to rescue them before updating. You can also configure pkgsrc to use other than the default directories by setting the DISTDIR and PACKAGES variables. See for the details. To update pkgsrc from a tar file, download the tar file as explained above. Then, make sure that you have not made any changes to the files in the pkgsrc directory. Remove the pkgsrc directory and extract the new tar file. Done. To update pkgsrc via CVS, make sure the environment variable CVS_RSH is set as above. Then, change to the pkgsrc directory and run cvs: &uprompt; cd /usr/pkgsrc &uprompt; cvs update -dP When updating pkgsrc, the CVS program keeps track of the branch you selected. But if you, for whatever reason, want to switch from the stable branch to the current one, you can do it by adding the option -A after the update keyword. To switch from the current branch back to the stable branch, add the -rpkgsrc-2009Q3 option. When you update pkgsrc, the CVS program will only touch those files that are registered in the CVS repository. That means that any packages that you created on your own will stay unmodified. If you change files that are managed by CVS, later updates will try to merge your changes with those that have been done by others. See the CVS manual, chapter update for details.