Summary of Changes to NetBSD's Packages Collection 33
Dan writes "NetBSD's Alistair Crooks indicates in his December 2002 report that there are 3402 packages in the NetBSD Packages Collection, up from 3327 the previous month, a rise of 75. The Package of the Month award goes to pkgsrc/pkgtools/pkgdepgraph, nominated by Andrew Brown - you'll need graphviz to look at the dependency graph that it produces, but the output is quite fascinating."
Re:pkgsrc on linux (Score:5, Informative)
Furthermore, pkgsrc also works under Darwin, FreeBSD, IRIX, OpenBSD and Solaris. See http://www.netbsd.org/Documentation/software/pack
Re:5 comments? (Score:5, Informative)
The package system is brilliant, and has really come into its own now that broadband Internet is affordable. I can do a CVS update of my pkgsrc tree once in a while, and then just update the handfull of apps I need. In the process, any underlying libraries also get updated. Debian users get all smug about the apt* suite of tools, but frankly they leave me underwhelmed in comparison to NetBSD.
Finally, the mailing lists are well organised with a list for each port and others for key features of the system. The subscribers are friendly, informed and rarely descend into the sad bickering that's all too frequent in the Linux world.
Chris
Re:which file system... (Score:5, Informative)
The equivalent of Debian unstable is known as "current" in NetBSD land. It is the cutting edge CVS branch, and contains notable new features like scheduler activations (the cool threading support just merged from another branch), and major SMP changes. Given the scale of these changes, installing current is definitely not a good introduction to NetBSD. I'm running 1.6 on the machine that I'm typing this, and 1.6M (the official version of current as we speak) on another machine. The 1.6M machine has been very stable for me, but there are a few quirks with things like Mozilla.
Chris
Re:which file system... (Score:2, Informative)
I'm running 1.6 stable with all the patches, but I suggest NetBSD-1.6-release [netbsd.org], which is basically the formal 1.6-stable release, but with all the patches already applied for you. The link I gave you is for the most recent daily snapshot, which is probably what you'll want.
Re:pkgsrc on linux (Score:3, Informative)
Re:5 comments? (Score:3, Informative)
Yes. It's in the package tree. When you first install, you have the base system by default; then you decide which packages you wish to install (available both as binaries via pkg_add, or as source via the pkgsrc tree [downloadable via ftp or CVS]).
Also, the GNU tools are available, and in most cases enabled by default in the base system. And the rest are available as packages (frankly I would have gone insane if I didn't have my bash :-)
And yes, they have their own version of 'ls', though I don't see any reason why you couldn't replace it, if you really wanted to.