pkgsrc-2012Q1 is branched

The next quarterly release of pkgsrc, pkgsrc-2012Q1, has been branched.  I’ll start building binary packages momentarily.

The branch should show up in DragonFly git later today.  Once available, you can change any references to ‘pkgsrc-2011Q4’ in /usr/Makefile to ‘pkgsrc-2012Q1’, and then to switch to it:

  1. cd /usr/pkgsrc
  2. git branch pkgsrc-2012Q1 origin/pkgsrc-2012Q1
  3. git checkout pkgsrc-2012Q1
  4. git pull

At that point, you can start building and installing newer applications.  For more details on that, check the pkgsrc guide on the DragonFly website.

Note that you don’t have to do that; you can stick with the 2011Q4 (or earlier) packages you have installed now, if you don’t want to deal with software changes right now, or if you want to wait for the binary packages to become available.  Upgrades/security fixes only happen for the latest quarterly release, though.

Note: don’t assume I tested this before advising you to do it, or anything like that.  I mean, come on.

Plans for pkgsrc

I just removed old pkgsrc binary packages for DragonFly 2.6/2.7 from avalon, so if somehow you are running a version of DragonFly that old, and still using binary packages, you’ll want to upgrade.  I’m pretty confident that describes nobody.

Also, I have plans for coordinating the next pkgsrc release of 2012Q1, due April 6th, with the probably next minor upgrade of DragonFly, 3.0.3.  I wrote out my plans already, so go read.  (plus followup)

Build report for pkgsrc

For the curious, I recently sent a bulk build report for pkgsrc-2011Q4 to the lists.  Other than ruby-193 (which is fixed in pkgsrc HEAD thanks to John Marino), we’re looking pretty good!  I’m curious if KDE or Gnome could actually get installed via binary; that’s sort of an ultimate goal due to the number of packages involved.

Speaking of Ruby, the default in pkgsrc may change soon, along with some of the involved Rails packages.

Things I’ve never seen before, in pkgsrc

I was reading an article about how Tumblr scaled to handle the huge amount of data it’s regularly pushing out.  Apparently, it started life as a traditional LAMP stack, but they’ve since moved on – to software packages I have not yet needed to ever use.  Being open source software, it all has crazy names.  Some of these packages are perfectly familiar to me now, but others are completely new.

Anyway, for fun, I decided to see how many of these sometimes new-to-me packages were present in pkgsrc.  I’ll reproduce a paragraph from the story that lists the software they use, and link each one that I found in pkgsrc.

That’s actually more than I thought I’d find, though I can’t articulate why.  Anyway, if any of the names are unfamiliar to you, now is the time to follow up.   Redis, for example, looks more interesting to me at a casual glance than the normal NoSQL models I’ve heard about.

Some BSD Multimedia

Here’s several things to look at:

Michael Lucas’s “BSD Needs Books” talk from NYCBSDCon 2010, on Youtube.  I’ve talked about it before because I saw it in person; it’s a good talk.  Ironically, he talks about getting a publisher interested in your book, and he just self-published.

Hubert Feyrer linked to the slides of two pkgsrc talks at FOSDEM; one about bringing pkgsrc to MirBSD, and one about pkgin, which is included in DragonFly.

Up-to-date packages and pkgsrc

Ulrich Habel wants to update some of the Perl 5 modules in pkgsrc.  He published a request for comments, describing what he plans to do for changing some dependencies.  He does note that Perl 5 in pkgsrc is at 5.14.2, which is very recent.

I was talking to a relative today who works at a large financial company, which is standardizing on Red Hat Enterprise.  I find it strange that Red Hat, which has a lot of money behind it, still ships a years-old and arguably broken version of perl.   By using pkgsrc, you’re getting more up-to-date software than people that actually shell out money for the privilege of compiling software.