The pkgsrc-2009Q4 Branch

[Alistair Crooks <agc%pkgsrc.org@localhost>]

The pkgsrc-2009Q4 Branch
========================

The pkgsrc developers are happy to announce the new pkgsrc-2009Q4
branch, which has support for even more packages than previous
branches. Some major packages have also been updated in this release.

At the same time, the pkgsrc-2009Q3 branch has been deprecated, and
continuing engineering starts on the pkgsrc-2009Q4 branch.

Some highlights of the new pkgsrc-2009Q4 branch are:

+ a new version of libtool (2.2.6b) is being used
+ many more packages have been modified to handle DESTDIR installation
+ gnome has been updated to version 2.28.1, kde to 4.3.4
+ many, many packages have been updated to newer versions, to take
  advantage of fixes and improved functionality.  The following
  versions of packages are included in the pkgsrc-2009Q4 branch:

        + apache-2.2.14
        + bzr-2.0.1
        + firefox-3.5.6
        + git-1.6.6 (the package is known as scmgit in pkgsrc)
        + gnome-2.28.1
        + kde-3.5.10nb4 and 4.3.4
        + mercurial-1.4.1
        + mysql-5.0.88
        + openoffice-3.1.1
        + perl-5.10.1
        + postgresql-8.3.9 and postgresql-8.4.2
        + python-2.5.4nb5 and python-2.6.4nb4
        + ruby-1.8.7.174nb2
        + samba-3.0.37
        + seamonkey-2.0.1
        + subversion-1.6.5
        + wireshark-1.2.6
        + zope-3.3.1

+ other notable changes include
        + we bid a fond thanks, and farewell, to some old favourites,
          such as firefox3-bin, lyx-qt and lyx-xforms (replaced by lyx),
          zip1 (replaced by zip), ghostscript6, xfce3 (replaced by xfce4)
          and dovecot-sieve (replaced by the sieve option to dovecot)
        + the addition of some interesting, pertinent, and shiny
          packages such as fossil, bzr-explorer, openjdk7, echinus,
          pfe, kegs, rcfunge, clang, libmicro, ktorrent3, datadraw,
          topless, typolight28, neb-wipe, openmpi, and tint2
        + notable updates to packages such as autoconf, boehm-gc,
          boost, bzr, clamav, compiz, curl, ecl, exim, fontforge,
          freeradius2, getmail, glib2, gnuplot, gnutls, gpsd, ikiwiki,
          kde, libtorrent and rtorrent, memtestplus, nagios, netpgp,
          nsd, ntp4, nullmailer, octave, openldap, openresolv,
          openvpn, parrot, pcre, pear, perl5, pngcrush, puppet,
          py-anita, qbzr, qemu, qt4, roundcube, rox, rump, sigil,
          squid, thunderbird, tmux, tor, vte, wget, wireshark,
          xentools33, xlockmore, and xulrunner

+ the "Package of the Quarter" award is hereby awarded jointly to
clang, the compiler and lowlevel virtual machine infrastructure
nominated by Matthias Drochner, and to compiz, the compositing window
manager, nominated by iMil.  An honorable mention, too, to openmpi,
nominated by Aleksej Saushev, and with thanks to Kevin Buckley for his
work on it.

The list of platforms supported by pkgsrc is AIX, BSD/OS, Darwin (Mac
OS X), DragonFly BSD, FreeBSD, HP/UX, IRIX, Interix, Linux, NetBSD,
OSF1, OpenBSD, QNX and SunOS (Solaris).  We are aware that support for
some platforms is at a more mature stage than others, and would like
to encourage feedback from users and developers on our more esoteric
platforms.

+ continuing engineering on the "stable" branches of pkgsrc continues
to work well, and our release engineering team has done a marvelous
job in pulling up changes to the stable branch.  Our thanks go to
Geert Hendrickx, Matthias Scheler, Lubomir Sedlacik, Tyler Retzlaff,
and S.P.Zeidler for all the hard work they do in sanity checking
pullup requests, and managing the stable branches in pkgsrc.

+ constant bulk building on a number of platforms has improved our
ability to identify potential areas of concern, and to correct them
sooner.  It has also improved our ability to make binary packages
available, and we are working on ways to improve this further.  For
more information, please refer to the pkgsrc-bulk mailing list,
archives available at

        http://mail-index.netbsd.org/pkgsrc-bulk/

+ the number of packages has grown from 8969 to 9100; the number of
supported platforms is currently 14, with another one on the horizon. 
NetBSD, on all its supported architectures, is considered to be one
pkgsrc platform.

+ Julio M. Merino Vidal has added some new auto-update functionality
for NetBSD-current's periodic checks.

As always, we'd like to encourage users of the packages collection to
audit-packages at least every day - this will provide notification of
any packages which are vulnerable to exploit.  Audit-packages is part
of the pkg_install tools.

The pkgsrc-security team do a marvelous job in tracking notifications
of vulnerabilities in packages, and disseminating this information,
and our sincere thanks go to them for this essential work.

We'd also really appreciate it if people would install the
pkgsrc/pkgtools/pkgsurvey package, and then run the pkgsurvey script
for us.  This will forward us a list of the packages installed on that
machine, and the operating system and release level of the operating
system.  The results will be kept confidential, but the output will
help us analyse the packages that are most used.

The source tar files for the new branch can be found at:

        ftp://ftp.NetBSD.org/pub/pkgsrc/pkgsrc-2009Q4/pkgsrc.tar.gz
                or
        ftp://ftp.NetBSD.org/pub/pkgsrc/pkgsrc-2009Q4/pkgsrc.tar.bz2

You can also use the "pkgsrc-2009Q4" tag to check it out yourself from
anoncvs.NetBSD.org or any of the mirrors.

Alistair Crooks
On behalf of the Packages Team
The NetBSD Foundation