On Thu, 22 Oct 1998, Joe Laffey wrote:

> I don't have either of those files. I don't see them in the misc part of
> the pkgsrc either. Am I missing something here?

Yep. To most of the NetBSD folks there's a difference between the main
distribution and the packages. To you, and to most of the folks who have
recently found NetBSD, there's not as clear a difference. That's not to
say you're doing anything wrong. If anything, we need to make the
documents clearer.

The misc distribution I mentioned is part of the main NetBSD release. It
is on the same footing as base, comp, text, man, etc, games, and secr. All
of the files are generated from source which usually lives in /usr/src -
source which the NetBSD foundation takes care of. These files are released
together, and actually define a release of NetBSD. You should update them
all at the same time. I.E. if you upgrade from 1.2 to 1.3.2, you shuld
upgrade all parts of the stock system.

The package system is different. There, the NetBSD developers maintian
patches to externally-available source. Also, the package system provides
an easy way to maintain software. If you want to make sure you have the
latest version of a program, just cd to its directory in the pkgsrc tree,
and type make. You'll get the version which a NetBSD developer (or
contributor) got working (I'm trying to say that if version 1.3 came out
this morening, the pkgsrc might still refer to version 1.2.X, but
otherwise it should be recent).

One other difference is that the distribution sets are really designed to
be installed by cd'ing to /, and then doing a tar xzc set.tgz. The
packages, either ones you compile or pre-built ones, are intended to be
installed via the pkg_ commands. Even though packages really are tar
files, you shouldn't use tar to install them.

A record (a database) of installed packages is kept, which lets you do a
lot of cool things. Like a package can say it needs another package to be
installed.  the pkg_ tools should tell you if something's missing. Plus
packages can superseed each other. Or a package can say it conflicts with
another one. Etc.

Also, packages come with instruction on how to remove them. So you can do
a pkg_delete X and all of X disapears.

There's a move afoot to make it so that the main distribution use the
package system, but it's still under discussion.

So get ahold of misc.tgz for the distribution you're using (1.3.2 or
-current) and install it. Then ispell will work.

Take care,

Bill