Help understanding pkgsrc snapshots

[vom513 <vom513%gmail.com@localhost>]

Hello all,

A few disclaimers up front:

- This is no way intended to be anything negative against NetBSD devs.  I 100% appreciate all the hard work in the project.  Just trying to understand and “do the right thing” in terms of my systems.
- I come from the linux world (don’t shoot !) - so I’m more used to a smaller breadth in this regard (obviously NetBSD supports oodles of platforms so I get this…)

I’ve been playing with NetBSD 9.3 on one of my old sparcstations (32 bit).  As you can imagine - the speed of the system makes compiling from pkgsrc a bit onerous.  So because of this I try to use pre-built packages when possible.  I also have some amd64 VMs that I use to test out things I don’t want to clutter the sparcs with.  Useful to compare behavior as well between the arch’s.

So some of my questions / confusion:

- Take a look at http://ftp.netbsd.org/pub/pkgsrc/pkgsrc-2022Q4/  In that dir there are bundles that have the snapshot name in them, and others that don’t.  Very hard to tell what is what.  I would assume the ones with the snapshot in the name are the ones of that snapshot based on the file dates ?  What are the others with dates ahead of the snapshot date ?

- Compare these two dirs:
	http://ftp.netbsd.org/pub/pkgsrc/packages/NetBSD/amd64/
	http://ftp.netbsd.org/pub/pkgsrc/packages/NetBSD/sparc/

amd64 has a lot more subdirs, versions etc.  Not consistent.  Is this because of the “tier” status of the arch’s ?

- So as time moves on - I would guess older packages* dir’s get removed.  Are there any timelines/guidelines on when this happens ?  My thinking is along the lines of say Ubuntu where unless it’s LTS (5 years) - the intermediate versions repos go dark.  So running a non-LTS system - you will find you can’t (easily) install packages after such and such a time…

Hopefully my questions make sense.  Thanks.