As noted in announcements, pkgsrc is entering a 10-day freeze period starting tomorrow. If everything goes to plan, the next quarterly release of pkgsrc, 2011Q1, will be released April 3rd.
My first bulk build of pkgsrc with gcc 4.4 has completed; the results are available. Notice that most of the errors are from checksum problems with downloads, not actual problems from the compiler change. I’m starting a new build to see if the checksum problems go away with fresh downloads.
The GIF format, or rather the LZW format it uses, is no longer patent-encumbered. (GIF patent worries led to the creation of the PNG format, if I’m not mistaken) Matthias Drochner has changed pkgsrc to use giflib instead of libungif.
According to Wikipedia, the patent expired more than 5 years ago, so this isn’t really news other than some packages need to be rebuilt. Still, memories of the general Internet Outrage from a decade ago are interesting compared to the events of today.
There’s two recent changes for pkgsrc and DragonFly:
- DragonFly-current (2.9) now pulls the most recent pkgsrc quarterly release (2010Q4) by default, instead of pkgsrc-current. This means more packages will be working with the default setup, plus pkg_radd and other tools will be pulling the same ‘generation’ of software.
- The DragonFly/git version of pkgsrc can now be created as a shallow clone. This means less file history, but also means a much faster download.
If you’re curious, I have a bulk build on DragonFly 2.9/x86_64/pkgsrc-current finished. Work on the programs that don’t build is always welcome. It’s pretty good for bleeding-edge, though!
… is to make its patches unnecessary, by getting the changes needed for any program to compile on DragonFly built right into the program. (Often called “pushing patches upstream”) That usually means creating a patch and then tracking down the program authors to get them to include those changes in the next release of a project. That tracking down can be a majority of the work. In that case: thanks, Rumko!
Update: Also, thanks, Matthias Rampke! He did the same thing for pcc.
Matthias Scheler is looking for Postfix testers. If you run it, he has a patch to version 2.8.1 he’d like you to try.
Also, the final list of GTK1-using packages that are not actively updated has been determined. These packages are leaving pkgsrc next week unless there’s any last-minute intercessions.
If you’re like me, you’ve been using XMMS for music playback since just about forever. It’s ancient, though. It uses GTK1, and since Thomas Klausner is trying to get GTK1 dependencies out of pkgsrc, he listed a roundup of alternatives on the pkgsrc-users mailing list, most/all of which are in pkgsrc. Pouya Tafti added some more.
Thomas Klausner is planning to get rid of the last bits of GTK1 in pkgsrc, which means some old/non-updated software has to go too. Speak up on the pkgsrc-users@netbsd.org mailing list if you need some of that listed software, or (better yet) provide patches to move it to GTK2.
pkgin, the binary pkgsrc manager similar to apt/yum, is now at version 0.4.0. You can get it now if you use pkgsrc-current, or just wait for the next quarterly pkgsrc release.
So, I felt lucky recently. I updated shiningsilence.com from DragonFly 2.6 to DragonFly 2.8, and wanted to upgrade my pkgsrc packages from pkgsrc-2010Q3 to pkgsrc-2010Q4.
You can do this with pkg_rolling-replace, or various other tools, but I wanted to see if I could do it completely with binary packages. I used pkg_radd -uv <pkgname> for each of the major packages I had installed.
Surprisingly, it worked, for every package. I had to force-install some Perl modules because I was moving from 5.10 to 5.12, but I think I may have been able to use an additional -u switch to get by that problem. I did use pkg_leaves to identify packages I didn’t need, and removed them to reduce the number of items to upload.
It was exactly what I wanted. Previous pkgsrc upgrades had taken most of a day, as I had to build from source and figure out what went where. We’ve had a better success rate in bulk builds recently, and this paid off in an upgrade process that only took perhaps an hour.
BIND version 9.5 has reached End of Life status. In fact, it did it some time ago. However, net/bind95 in pkgsrc has just been deleted. Update to 9.6/9.7, if you still had9.5 in place.
If you’ve ever installed pkgsrc packages from source, you probably typed ‘bmake install’. There’s a ‘bin-install’ target that will use binary packages if they are available, but you have to set the appropriate environment variables to do so.
It’s now much easier, on DragonFly. If you have pkgsrc-current as of yesterday or later, or pkgsrc-2011Q1 when it arrives, you can type ‘bmake bin-install’ for a pkgsrc application and it will download the binary package automatically, if it’s available, and build from source if it’s not.
This is a setup I’ve wanted for a while – the speed of a binary install, plus a fallback if the binary isn’t available.
If you’re using the binary pkgsrc package installer pkgin, version 0.4 is available for testing.
They’re finally uploaded! See my rather lengthy post about it on users@ for all the details.
I’ve had the bulk builds of pkgsrc-2010Q4 finish on 2.9 systems, for i386 and for x86_64. The uploads for 2.9/x86_64 seem to have completed…
Sourceforge had/has a security problem, so they’ve turned off some services until it’s fixed. However, anything planning to download from Sourceforge will be affected, so some packages in pkgsrc may not be able to build for … a day or two?
The pkgsrc-2010Q4 branch is now available in DragonFly’s git repo, via ‘git checkout pkgsrc-2010Q4’ in /usr/pkgsrc. Enjoy!
Here’s where the binary build is: summarized in a post to users@. So far so good…