Don’t upgrade, do recompile

A bump in shared library version for libssl/libcrypto means that any programs dependent on it will require a rebuild – including any pkgsrc programs.

This only affects you if you are running 2.7, for now.  It means that on upgrading from 2.6 to 2.8, any libssl-using programs will need to be updated.  This may not be a big thing, since pkgsrc-2010Q3 will also be out and people will want to upgrade anyway.

Binary package upgrade issue

I’ve noticed that if you have older pkgsrc packages installed, and install binary packages for pkgsrc-2010Q2, those packages will refuse to install if pkg_install is an older version than what they were built with.

I ended up force-deleting pkg_install and bmake, and reinstalling by running pkgtools/bootstrap/bootstrap.  There may be better solutions; I’m mentioning it now since it’s a known problem.

Update: “bmake replace USE_DESTDIR=yes” was suggested by Joerg Sonnenberger.  “pkg_add -u /path/to/newer/pkg_install” should also work (untested).

This will probably apply to the upcoming pkgsrc-2010Q3, too.  Building from source is a workaround for now.

rpkgmanager, a want-list based pkgsrc manager

Some time ago, there was an application called pkgmanager, available in pkgsrc-wip.   It worked by tracking ‘wanted’ packages in pkgsrc, and upgrading based on that list.  It hasn’t been updated in some time, however, and may not even build.

‘Rumko’ has written a replacement, called rpkgmanager.   The Gitorious page linked in the previous sentence includes the URL to download the code via Git, so it’s available to try now even though it’s not yet in pkgsrc.

Lazy reading: toeplitz, forking, curating, Nethack

I totally meant to post this yesterday.  Oops!