A contributor over at the #NetBSD Community Blog called me out on my errors. I corrected my goof on CGD, but I need someone to explain what the difference between pkgsrc and pkgsrc-wip is. I know one’s a “work in progress”, but that doesn’t answer what the relationship is between the two, or how pacakges may move between them. I’m calling you smarty-pants out on the rug now – I want you to answer what 30 seconds of web surfing has not!
4 Replies to “What is wip, eh?”
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I think it is this way:
pkgsrc-wip is not the “unstable” or “in-development” version of pkgsrc. It is a sort of exploratory sandbox for people to learn the ropes of package creation or for packages that are not quite ready to be committed to pkgsrc.
I hope I am not mistaken.
I think wip is a place, where communitysubmissions are placed: http://pkgsrc.se/info.php
“pkgsrc-wip (work in progress) is a project to get more people actively involved with creating packages for pkgsrc,
a portable packaging system coming from NetBSD, but ported to many other operating systems, including
Solaris, Linux, Darwin, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, and others.”
There are currently three different pkgsrc repositories: the two official pkgsrc-branches HEAD and pkgsrc-yyyyQqq, and pkgsrc-wip. The two official branches are actively maintained, but HEAD includes current developments on the pkgsrc system as well as the newest (mostly) stable versions (except where noted otherwise, for instance pkgname-devel for development versions). Thus, HEAD is generally usable and stable, but problems may occur. For the quarterly maintenance branch, HEAD is frozen for normally around two weeks, and the package maintainers are to fix open issues with their packages to provide a rather bug-free repository of packages. After the freeze, only fixes to security and portability flaws get backported to the then-opened maintenance branch. Note that both official pkgsrc variants are maintained by a rather small group of core developers with CVS commit access, while fixes from external persons cannot be committed directly, just PRed. In contrast, pkgsrc-wip is open to nearly everyone, thus not as carefully maintained and likely unstable, this is also why it is often used by official pkgsrc-developers for testing new packages as well. When certain packages from -wip proved stable and mature (or at least their packaging does so, for instance according to pkglint, a tool to check for conformance with usual pkgsrc-conventions), and there’s some pkgsrc-developer willing to maintain it, they may eventually be imported to pkgsrc HEAD.
HTH, cheers,
Dennis
pkgsrc is the official thing where only NetBSD (and pkgsrc :) developers have access. This goes into pkgsrc-200x@y branches, gets regular bulk builds to find errors and resulting packages are sometimes put up for FTP.
pkgsrc-wip is a sourceforce project where ~everyone can get commit access, and the state of most packages is accordingly. See http://pkgsrc-wip.sf.net/.
– Hubert