Category: 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.

I’m linking to this small discussion about licensing and its documentation in pkgsrc, just because these paragraphs, out of context, are good for any pkgsrc user to know.

The freeze for pkgsrc-2011Q4 has started.  No updates to pkgsrc, other than for security, for the next two weeks.

The last quarterly release of pkgsrc for the year is scheduled for the end of this month.  This means the freeze, where only bugfixes are applies, will be starting on the 17th.

Almost all the packages in pkgsrc support non-root installation now…  except these last 31.  I recall something about their removal by the next quarterly release if they still don’t work, or maybe just after.  Jump in if one of these packages is useful to you.

Among other changes to pkgin 0.5 (available in pkgsrc-wip but not pkgsrc-2011Q3), it now notices if you need a newer pkg_install because you’ve shifted to a more recent quarterly release of pkgsrc, and grabs the appropriate binary package to fix that.  Thanks, iMil!