pkgsrc-2013Q3 ============= The pkgsrc team is proud to announce the availability of the pkgsrc-2013Q3 branch. There are many new packages, and some bug fixes. Lots of perl packages were updated and added for this branch. We would also like to emphasize the new lang/go package and the newly added support for GNU/kFreeBSD. Numbers of Packages =================== In pkgsrc, there are: 13184 total packages for NetBSD-current/amd64 12681 binary packages built with clang for NetBSD-current/amd64 11026 binary packages built with gcc for Joyent's SmartOS/i386 10971 binary packages built with gcc for Joyent's SmartOS/amd64 180 packages have been added this quarter 4 packages have been renamed this quarter 15 packages have been removed this quarter 1366 packages have been updated this quarter These numbers may not compare exactly to other (binary) packaging systems; some packaging systems split large packages like boost up into multiple packages, while others keep unused and unbuildable packages. Pkgsrc Release Schedule ======================= The pkgsrc developers make a new release every three months. We believe that this is a sweet spot between too many updates, and keeping abreast of issues like security vulnerabilities. Pkgsrc is not tied to any one operating system or architecture, which gives us the ability to decouple the releases from any operating system releases, and to concentrate on the packages themselves. Package Additions ================= Many perl packages were added. We also added packages for the new major 2.0 branches of ffmpeg and SDL. Package Removals ================ mysql5-{server,client} has been removed, please migrate to a newer (supported) version. Pkgsrc-security =============== One neat feature of pkgsrc is its ability to sort package versions based on the version numbers. It's used in audit-packages, to report on any installed packages which may have security vulnerabilities in them. pkgsrc-security@pkgsrc.org maintains lists of vulnerable packages, along with reference URLs relating to the exposure. We thank OBATA Akio, Daniel Horecki, Guillaume Lasmayous, and Tim Zingelman for their hard work. Sample output from audit-packages is shown below: % audit-packages Package bash-4.2nb1 has a buffer-overflow vulnerability, see http://cve.mitre.org/cgi-bin/cvename.cgi?name=CVE-2012-3410 % Getting pkgsrc ============== More information can be found in http://www.netbsd.org/docs/pkgsrc/getting.html tar files for pkgsrc, along with checksums, can be found at http://ftp.netbsd.org/pub/pkgsrc/pkgsrc-2013Q3/ and anonymous cvs can be used: cvs -z3 -q -d anoncvs@anoncvs.NetBSD.org:/cvsroot checkout -r pkgsrc-2013Q3 -P pkgsrc About pkgsrc ============ pkgsrc is a cross-platform packaging system. It allows people to download sources and to build and install binary packages on one or more platforms. Building packages from source is useful for a number of reasons: + not only is the provenance of source code checked (by using multiple checksums), with pkgsrc, the version of source code you are working with is the same that other developers and users have. + patches are maintained in a central repository, and, again, are checked at patch application time by using digests. The patches which are applied to the sources being built are the same ones which are known to be used and proved by other pkgsrc users (not necessarily on the same platform). + by building from source, all doubts about compilers, build practices, source code cleanliness, and packaging differences are removed. Digital signatures of binary packages, while useful in themselves, only prove certain aspects of binary package provenance. (pkgsrc has had signed packages since 2001.) + it may be difficult or impossible to find a pre-built package for the operating system or architecture. + a pre-built package may have further or conflicting pre-requisites, which are themselves difficult to find or build. By building everything, including pre-requisites, a from-source packaging system can ensure that pre-requisites are present and integrated. At the present time, pkgsrc supports 21 platforms: AIX BSDOS Cygwin Darwin/Mac OS X DragonFly FreeBSD FreeMiNT GNU/kFreeBSD HPUX Haiku IRIX Interix/SFU/SUA Linux Minix3 MirBSD NetBSD OSF1 OpenBSD QNX Solaris/illumos UnixWare Complete dependency and pre-requisite package information is held and used by the package management software - if packages rely on other packages to function properly, that pre-requisite will be built, installed and managed as part of the package installation process. Binary packages can be managed using pkgin. Thomas Klausner On behalf of the pkgsrc developers Mon Sep 30 11:18:35 CEST 2013