pkgsrc-2013Q4 branched

[Thomas Klausner <wiz%NetBSD.org@localhost>]

pkgsrc-2013Q4
=============

The pkgsrc team is proud to announce the availability of the
pkgsrc-2013Q4 branch. There are many new packages, and some bug fixes.

Numbers of Packages
===================
In pkgsrc, there are:

13472 total packages for NetBSD-current/amd64
13049 binary packages built with clang for NetBSD-current/amd64
11298 binary packages built with gcc for Joyent's SmartOS/i386
11249 binary packages built with gcc for Joyent's SmartOS/amd64
10111 binary packages built with gcc for Darwin 10.8.0/i386 (OS X)
9324 binary packages built with gcc for FreeBSD 9.1/amd64

279 packages have been added this quarter
3 packages have been renamed this quarter
45 packages have been removed this quarter
1380 packages have been updated this quarter

These numbers may not compare exactly to other (binary) packaging
systems; some packaging systems split large packages like boost up
into multiple packages, while others keep unused and unbuildable
packages.

Pkgsrc Release Schedule
=======================
The pkgsrc developers make a new release every three months.  We
believe that this is a sweet spot between too many updates, and
keeping abreast of issues like security vulnerabilities.  Pkgsrc is
not tied to any one operating system or architecture, which gives us
the ability to decouple the releases from any operating system
releases, and to concentrate on the packages themselves.

Package Additions
=================
We would like to emphasize the new libreoffice4, qt5, and
SUSE-13.1-based Linux emulation support packages.

Package of the Month
====================

Hubert Feyrer nominated Ansible, for automating system setup and
configuration tasks with interfaces to many subsystems that can be
combined, e.g. software installation (pkgin!), user and database
management, Amazon's AWS cloud services. The package was recently
updated to match the latest Ansible release 1.4.1.

Pkgsrc-security
===============
One neat feature of pkgsrc is its ability to sort package versions
based on the version numbers.  It's used in audit-packages, to report
on any installed packages which may have security vulnerabilities in
them.  pkgsrc-security%pkgsrc.org@localhost maintains lists of vulnerable
packages, along with reference URLs relating to the exposure.  We
thank OBATA Akio, Daniel Horecki, Guillaume Lasmayous, and Tim
Zingelman for their hard work.  Sample output from audit-packages is
shown below:

% audit-packages
Package bash-4.2nb1 has a buffer-overflow vulnerability, see 
http://cve.mitre.org/cgi-bin/cvename.cgi?name=CVE-2012-3410
%

Getting pkgsrc
==============
More information can be found in
        http://www.netbsd.org/docs/pkgsrc/getting.html

tar files for pkgsrc, along with checksums, can be found at
        http://ftp.netbsd.org/pub/pkgsrc/pkgsrc-2013Q4/

and anonymous cvs can be used:
        cvs -z3 -q -d anoncvs%anoncvs.NetBSD.org@localhost:/cvsroot checkout -r 
pkgsrc-2013Q4 -P pkgsrc

About pkgsrc
============
pkgsrc is a cross-platform packaging system.  It allows people to
download sources and to build and install binary packages on one or
more platforms.

Building packages from source is useful for a number of reasons:

+ not only is the provenance of source code checked (by using multiple
checksums), with pkgsrc, the version of source code you are working
with is the same that other developers and users have.

+ patches are maintained in a central repository, and, again, are
checked at patch application time by using digests. The patches
which are applied to the sources being built are the same ones which
are known to be used and proved by other pkgsrc users (not necessarily
on the same platform).

+ by building from source, all doubts about compilers, build practices,
source code cleanliness, and packaging differences are removed. 
Digital signatures of binary packages, while useful in themselves,
only prove certain aspects of binary package provenance. (pkgsrc has
had signed packages since 2001.)

+ it may be difficult or impossible to find a pre-built package for
the operating system or architecture.

+ a pre-built package may have further or conflicting pre-requisites,
which are themselves difficult to find or build. By building everything,
including pre-requisites, a from-source packaging system can ensure
that pre-requisites are present and integrated.

At the present time, pkgsrc supports 21 platforms:

        AIX
        BSDOS
        Cygwin
        Darwin/Mac OS X
        DragonFly
        FreeBSD
        FreeMiNT
        GNU/kFreeBSD
        HPUX
        Haiku
        IRIX
        Interix/SFU/SUA
        Linux
        Minix3
        MirBSD
        NetBSD
        OSF1
        OpenBSD
        QNX
        Solaris/illumos
        UnixWare

Complete dependency and pre-requisite package information is held and
used by the package management software - if packages rely on other
packages to function properly, that pre-requisite will be built,
installed and managed as part of the package installation process. 
Binary packages can be managed using pkgin.

Thomas Klausner
On behalf of the pkgsrc developers
Tue Dec 31 11:26:48 CET 2013