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Summary of Changes to NetBSD's Packages Collection
Dan writes "NetBSD's Alistair Crooks indicates in his December 2002 report that there are 3402 packages in the NetBSD Packages Collection, up from 3327 the previous month, a rise of 75. The Package of the Month award goes to pkgsrc/pkgtools/pkgdepgraph, nominated by Andrew Brown - you'll need graphviz to look at the dependency graph that it produces, but the output is quite fascinating."
Yes, it works beautifully. There have even been reports of a Linux installation that is _entirely_ managed by pkgsrc (that is, including the base system, glibc, kernel etc.). Certainly beats rpm, apt and the like.
a ges.html#bootstrap for details.
Furthermore, pkgsrc also works under Darwin, FreeBSD, IRIX, OpenBSD and Solaris. See http://www.netbsd.org/Documentation/software/pack
-- "Tradition is the illusion of permanence."
I have to second this recommendation to try out NetBSD. I've used various Linux distros and all three of the free BSD's on a regular basis, but keep on coming back to NetBSD. It just exudes quality, and even a cretin like me can understand large chunks of the codebase.
The package system is brilliant, and has really come into its own now that broadband Internet is affordable. I can do a CVS update of my pkgsrc tree once in a while, and then just update the handfull of apps I need. In the process, any underlying libraries also get updated. Debian users get all smug about the apt* suite of tools, but frankly they leave me underwhelmed in comparison to NetBSD.
Finally, the mailing lists are well organised with a list for each port and others for key features of the system. The subscribers are friendly, informed and rarely descend into the sad bickering that's all too frequent in the Linux world.
Chris
The 1.6.1 release will be out shortly, in a matter of a few weeks judging by credible reports. I would strongly suggest you go with that release for a first taste of NetBSD. The "stable" CVS branch is akin to Debian testing, and is the branch from which 1.6.1 will be cut. With the release so close it's not really worth rolling your own, although pre-compiled binaries are available on ftp://releng.netbsd.org/pub/NetBSD-daily/.
The equivalent of Debian unstable is known as "current" in NetBSD land. It is the cutting edge CVS branch, and contains notable new features like scheduler activations (the cool threading support just merged from another branch), and major SMP changes. Given the scale of these changes, installing current is definitely not a good introduction to NetBSD. I'm running 1.6 on the machine that I'm typing this, and 1.6M (the official version of current as we speak) on another machine. The 1.6M machine has been very stable for me, but there are a few quirks with things like Mozilla.
Chris