On Oct 16,  1:43am, "Rakhesh Sasidharan" wrote:
} 
} By the end of this thread, I know a lot more abt pkgsrc and updating
} through CVS. Cool! Just sumarizing for future reference:
} 
} 1) The path where pkgsrc is stored does not matter. I can have it
} anywhere I want. pkgsrc uses relative paths internally.

     Yes.

} 2) All the CVS directories that I see littered around in pkgsrc are
} actually CVS meta information. Used by CVS to update my pkgsrc tree to
} the current one.

     Yes.

} 3) The tarball has all these CVS directories. So you can always start
} with the tarball and then keep updating using CVS.

     Yes.

} 4) And finally ... there are multiple pkgsrc trees -- the main/
} current one (pkgsrc) in which all the development activities happen,
} and the quarterly ones ("pkgsrc-2005Q4" and so on) that do not get
} updated later except for security updates and stuff. I knew this, but
} what I didnt know was that its possible to follow multiple trees on
} the same machine. As in, I can have /usr/pkgsrc (for current) and
} /usr/pkgsrc-2006Q1 (for 2006's Q1 tree), and I can have both of these
} updates using cvs (for the latter, I have to specify the release name
} with the -r2006Q1 argument).

     Basically.  There is really just one tree with multiple revisions
(-r stands for revision).  Once you set a tree to a particular branch
it will typically stay there.  The other thing is that you shouldn't
install packages from different branches on the same system.

} for pkgsrc-current:
} (/usr/pkgsrc/current)# cvs up -dp
} 
} for a specific version:
} 
} (/usr/pkgsrc-2005Q3)# cvs up -dp -rpkgsrc-2005Q3

     Not quite.  It should be "-dP".  It is very important that 'P' be
capitalised.  A lower case 'p' will cause the file to be sent to your
screen.

} Three cheers to the pkgsrc team from my side too. Really, this is an
} awesome piece of work! The first time I used pkgsrc, and I saw how it
} downloaded the sources and patched them and was actually building them
} for my machine -- that was a "wow!" moment. One is so used to
} downloading binary packages blindly usually, I had never given any
} thought to compiling stuff from source. Gave me a whole new
} perspective to this "open source" and "freedom" and similar concepts.
} If you have the sources, then its always possible to compile it for
} other platforms too -- given some first time effort. That's something
} which struck me practically once I started using pkgsrc. Great work!

     pkgsrc supports all the different systems that NetBSD runs on.  It
also supports a variety of other Unix like operating systems.  You can
get the complete list at http://www.pkgsrc.org/ .

     I'm not officially part of the pkgsrc team, but I'm pretty sure
they appreciate the sentiment.

}-- End of excerpt from "Rakhesh Sasidharan"