Announcing the pkgsrc-2014Q4 Branch
9 January, 2015 by agc@pkgsrc.org | netbsd
pkgsrc-2014Q4 ============= The pkgsrc team is proud to announce the availability of the pkgsrc-2014Q4 branch. We welcome some new gnuradio packages, say hello to suse-12.1 emulation, and say farewell to libreoffice3. Number of Packages ================== In pkgsrc, there are: 15510 possible pkgsrc packages in pkgsrc-2014Q4 12449 pkgsrc entries as reported by lintpkgsrc (unique package Makefiles) 15049 binary packages built with clang for NetBSD-current/x86_64 14430 binary packages built with gcc for NetBSD-6.0/x86_64 12972 binary packages built with gcc for Joyent's SmartOS/x86_64 In addition, this quarter: 156 packages have been added 4 packages have been renamed 48 packages removed, 9 with a successor 1575 packages updated Looking at the total annual changes made to pkgsrc, 2014 was a pretty good year: 1997: 184 1998: 908 1999: 1490 2000: 2110 2001: 3014 2002: 4337 2003: 5506 2004: 6744 2005: 5869 2006: 5740 2007: 4934 2008: 5915 2009: 6369 2010: 6236 2011: 5446 2012: 6212 2013: 6845 2014: 6406 Not as many packages changed as 2013 or 2004, but this year's activity ranked third out of the seventeen years that pkgsrc has been in existence - our thanks to the pkgsrc contributors and developers. 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. This is the 45th quarterly release of pkgsrc. Changes to pkgsrc ================= Ryosuke Moro continues to improve our haskell package support. Many pkgsrc developers and contributors have all helped with PR submissions, fixes and bug reports. Package Additions ================= New packages for afl, capstone, suse-12.1 emulation packages, hitori, gnuradio, guile-2.0, cgit, and rekonq were added. We also gained more python, perl, haskell, and ruby wrappers for many libraries. Package Removals ================ We actively manage the packages in pkgsrc, and delete ones that are not necessary. We said goodbye to libreoffice3 and skype1 and skype21 for this branch. Other Changes ============= We have introduced a new definition, PKGSRC_KEEP_BIN_PKGS, which allows the decision to keep binary packages to be set using a definition. More progress has been made on integrating cwrappers, and we expect this to continue next quarter. 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 the whole pkgsrc-security team for their hard work. Sample output from audit-packages is shown below: % audit-packages Package git-base-1.9.4 has a client-code-execution-from-hostile-server vulnerability, see http://cve.mitre.org/cgi-bin/cvename.cgi?name=CVE-2014-9390 % 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-2014Q4/ and anonymous cvs can be used: cvs -z3 -q -d anoncvs@anoncvs.NetBSD.org:/cvsroot checkout -r pkgsrc-2014Q4 -P pkgsrc or by pulling from the git mirrors at: https://github.com/jsonn/pkgsrc https://github.com/joyent/pkgsrc or the mercurial mirror at: https://bitbucket.org/agc/pkgsrc.hg 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 digests), with pkgsrc, the version of source code you are working with is the same that other developers and users have. + package builders can choose to customise their own installations by means of the option framework. pre-built packages from other builders may not have specified the same options. + 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 22 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 SCO OpenServer 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. Alistair Crooks On behalf of the pkgsrc developers Mon Dec 29 17:17:39 PST 2014