On 3 May 2003, Thomas Hafner wrote:

> my NetBSD book proposes to use the package source tree from

What book is that?

> ftp://ftp.netbsd.org/pub/NetBSD/NetBSD-current/. But almost all of my
> installation came still from a set of CDROMs containing NetBSD 1.6
> binary packages. Nevertheless installing exim and exim-html from the
> current package sourcetree seemed to work. Is it dangerous to mix
> different versions (1.6 and 1.6.1) that way? If so, what do I have to
> configure? Otherwise: what are the advantages or disadvantages of
> different versions? Maybe when choosing one way, I'll be forced to
> download more and more through my poor dialup connection, because of
> the dependency from new library releases?

It is usually fine to use the current pkgsrc. It is developed and tested
on multiple platforms and operating systems, so it shouldn't matter (in
most cases) between slight versions of NetBSD.

It is also usually okay to mix different versions (of 1.6 and 1.6.1) of
packages. I have a few machines like that.

Some advantage of the stable pkgsrc branch is knowing that the
dependencies work and it is well tested. It should have security fixes
too.

The current pkgsrc includes the security fixes, but also a lot of
continuing development, so sometimes it is harder to keep up-to-date
because of some many changes.

   Jeremy C. Reed
   http://bsd.reedmedia.net/