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Software Operating Systems BSD

NetBSD Packages Collection No Longer Frozen 73

jschauma writes "As many users will probably have noticed by the increase in recent pkgsrc commits, the NetBSD Packages Collection freeze is now officially over. Starting October 6th, 2003 and lasting almost two months, the NetBSD Packages team concentrated upon stabilizing the over 4,000 software packages and the pkgsrc infrastructure to prepare for a stable pkgsrc branch. During that time, the number of broken packages during a i386 bulk build was brought down to a mere 15, and a large number of PRs was closed. A new branch with the tag ``pkgsrc-2003Q4'' was created, allowing our users to maintain a highly stabilized third-party software package managment environment, as only pullups of significant importance (such as security issues) are applied to this branch."
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NetBSD Packages Collection No Longer Frozen

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  • Although I don't use NetBSD (did for a short period of time, but now a FreeBSD user), this is still happy news for me.

    Hmmmm, I wonder who's poor 486 got stuck with the 4000 package bulk build...
    • by alistair.crooks ( 715293 ) on Friday December 05, 2003 @10:17AM (#7638130)
      My Athlon XP 1800+, with 1.1 GB RAM and a fair bit of disk, was used. A "from-scratch" bulk-build takes between 5 and 6 days. The time for update bulk builds depends upon what was updated (duh). The machine was running NetBSD 1.6ZF (aka NetBSD-current), and the builds were done in a 1.6.2RC2 sandbox. The 15 broken packages which Jan mentioned can mostly be attributed to this setup: we found that pkgsrc/pkgtools/libkver works really well (it's a wrapper around sysctl(2)), but that Linux emulation has problems with libkver (because NetBSD and Linux use different ways of delivering errno for threaded programs). Using a wrapper for uname(1) allowed the packages which used Linux emulation during the build process to complete successfully, but imake uses sysctl(2) directly to get OS version information, and in the end we had to use a hybrid of the two to make packages. The bulk build results do not reflect this, which is probably the reason for the 15 packages.
  • The best thing... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Fulkkari ( 603331 ) on Friday December 05, 2003 @03:20AM (#7636839)

    The best thing about this is propably that new stabilized branch. In the past I've used almost everytime the newest sources available to keep up with all the patches, but if this new branch has only the important patches applied to it, it's definetely going to be the one I'm using. If this is going to be updated in the future too, the name of the new branch (pkgsrc-2003Q4) wasn't the best one though.

  • Stable pkgsrc (Score:2, Informative)

    by pkplex ( 535744 )
    If you want to stay on the old pkgsrc tree and receive importaint fixes only ( eg, security bug fixes ), then use the 'pkgsrc-2003Q4' cvs tag :)

  • As a casual user of NetBSD, I'm interested in version 2.0 as it will have lots of new stuff that I really want (threading etc.) Can anyone enlighten me as to the expected release schedule for 2.0?

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