[ANNOUNCEMENT] The pkgsrc-2010Q1 Branch

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

The pkgsrc-2010Q1 Branch
========================

The pkgsrc developers are happy to announce the new pkgsrc-2010Q1
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-2009Q4 branch has been deprecated, and
continuing engineering starts on the pkgsrc-2010Q1 branch.

Some highlights of the new pkgsrc-2010Q1 branch are:

+ we have almost finished the transition to DESTDIR installation, where
  a staging directory is used to make a binary package, which is then
  managed by the pkg_install tools
+ gnome has been updated to version 2.28.1, kde to 4.3.5
+ we have started changing packages to default to KDE4 instead of KDE3.
  For now, the old packages are still available as *-kde3 e.g. amarok
  is the KDE4 package, and amarok-kde3 is the KDE3 one
+ the default python package is now python26
+ squid 3.1.1 is now in pkgsrc, with some support for IPv6
+ php 5.3.x has been added
+ The conversion from the last teTeX distribution to texlive
  (currently 2009) is still in progress.
+ 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-2010Q1 branch:

        + apache-2.2.15
        + bzr-2.0.3
        + firefox-3.6.3
        + git-1.6.6.2 (the package is known as scmgit in pkgsrc)
        + gnome-2.28.1
        + kde-4.3.5
        + mercurial-1.5.1
        + mysql-5.1.44nb2
        + openoffice-3.1.1 and openoffice-bin-3.2.0
        + perl-5.10.1
        + postgresql-8.3.9nb2 and postgresql-8.4.2
        + python-2.5.4nb5 and python-2.6.4nb4
        + ruby-1.8.7.174nb4
        + samba-3.3.12
        + seamonkey-2.0.4
        + subversion-1.6.9nb1
        + wireshark-1.2.7
        + zope-3.3.1

+ other notable changes include
        + we bid a fond thanks, and farewell, to some old favourites,
          such as php4 and related packages, the old vmware modules
          packages, sun's jdk and jre versions 1.4 and 1.5, the ISC
          dhcp 3.x packages, galeon, swing, typolight-2.6 and tcl-8.3
        + the addition of some interesting, pertinent, and shiny
          packages such as tn3270 (:-) - brought over from NetBSD's
          src archive), mingw, colordiff, easygit, monotone-el, swt,
          fuse-bindfs, php-5.3, samba-3.3, xymon, musca, and qt4-mng
        + notable updates to packages such as bsd and gnu tar, amarok,
          lame, mpg123, mysql, openldap, postgresql, sqlite, boehm-gc, 
          boost, doxygen, fossil, glib, libev, libffi, memcached, nspr,
          nss, pango, pcre, rt3, readline, swig, xulrunner, vim, qemu,
          chicken, mono, parrot, openjdk7, python, php5, squeak, clamav,
          dovecot, fetchmail, getmail, gmime, linmilter, mew, sendmail,
          spamassassin, squirrelmail, thunderbird, octave, pari,
          calibre, dhcpcd, gupnp, nmap, rdist6, rsync, rtorrent, tnftpd,
          tor, transmission, unbound, aide, netpgp, openssl, bash, osh,
          tcsh, bacula, cdrtools, memtester, grub, pstree, rasqal, 
          openbox, firefox, ikiwiki, lighttpd, mediawiki, nginx, squid,
          seamonkey, typolight, gtk2, xsnow

+ the "Package of the Quarter" award is hereby awarded to qemu,
nominated by Joerg Sonnenberger, and samba33, nominated by Matthias Scheler.

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).  Haiku support is almost ready
to be added to pkgsrc.  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
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 9100 to 9315; the number of
supported platforms is currently 14.  NetBSD, on all its supported
architectures, is considered to be one pkgsrc platform.

As always, we'd like to encourage users of the packages collection to
audit for security problems at least every day using "pkg_admin audit"
- this will provide notification of any packages which are vulnerable
to exploit.  pkg_admin 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-2010Q1/pkgsrc.tar.gz
                or
        ftp://ftp.NetBSD.org/pub/pkgsrc/pkgsrc-2010Q1/pkgsrc.tar.bz2

You can also use the "pkgsrc-2010Q1" tag to check it out yourself from
anoncvs.NetBSD.org or any of the mirrors.

Alistair Crooks
On behalf of the pkgsrc developers