Changes to the NetBSD Packages Collection in February 2001
==========================================================

[The complete list of changes has been sent to the current-users
mailing list - agc]

By my calculations, there were 1871 packages in the NetBSD packages
collection on 1st March 2001.

Thomas Klausner has made a significant impact this month, by moving
the contents of the one-line comment file for each package into the
package's Makefile.  This reduction in the use of inodes has resulted
in a 16% speed-up in cvs update times, which is reproducible.  We hope
that there's a similar speed-up in extraction from the weekly pkgsrc
tar file.  I must say a huge thank you to Thomas for all his work.

There have been numerous security vulnerabilities announced this
month.  As always, I'd advise people to install the
pkgsrc/secrutiy/audit-packages package, and to run it regularly.

Notable additions to the packages collection last month include: 
6to4, some NetBSD backwards-compatibility packages, some prolog
implementations, curl, fressh, fugu and gale, g2, gnubile, hdf,
hercules, horde, lapack, lclint, a split libtool package, mew,
mutt-unstable (lovely name), various Perl5 utilities, pgcc, php4-ldap,
pkgsurvey, ratfor, a sane package revamp (thanks, Bernd), semi,
tcl-itcl, tits, xcdroast, and xuvmstat.

Notable updates to packages include:  6to4, adzap, analog, apache and
apache6, bind9, camediaplay, cdrecord, chasen, checkbot, crafty, cups,
cvslock, db3, f2c, ffcall, fressh, fxtv, gimp, gnupg, gnut, gqview,
grepmail, hdf5, ia64sim, imap-uw, ipadic, knews, libslang, libtool,
madplay (an excellent mp3 player), mew (updated 7 times!), mozilla,
nap, nhc98, noweb, openssh, opera, various Perl5 utilities, pico and
pine, the pkg_install tools, pkglint, port2pkg, postfix-current, qt2
and related packages, racoon, sendfile, sendmail, smtpfeed, snobol,
snort, squirrelmail, sudo, tkcvs, tscp, unzip, url2pkg, verilog,
windowmaker, xemacs, xfstt, xkeycaps, xscreensaver, xuvmstat and
zebra.

Package of the Month award goes (jointly) to gnucash, nominated by
Thomas Klausner, and to Steve Woodford's tiny terminal server, tits,
which I have used, and think is a very useful tool, especially if you
use serial consoles.  Honourable mentions, though, go to xuvmstat and
fressh.

As a final note, I'd like to point out the existence of the
pkgsrc/pkgtools/pkgsurvey utility, which is designed to give the
pkgsrc people a much better idea of what you consider to be the most
important packages.  This package does send information about the
packages installed on your computer to a central site, so if you are
concerned about this, you don't need to know any more.

Alistair G. Crooks
Thu Mar  1 07:11:28 GMT 2001