[ANNOUNCEMENT] The pkgsrc-2007Q4 Branch

[Alistair Crooks <agc%pkgsrc.org@localhost>]

The pkgsrc-2007Q4 Branch
========================

The pkgsrc developers are very proud to announce the new pkgsrc-2007Q4
branch, which has support for more packages than previous branches. 
As well as updated versions of many packages, the infrastructure of
pkgsrc itself has been improved for better platform and compiler
support.

At the same time, the pkgsrc-2007Q3 branch has been deprecated, and
continuing engineering starts on the pkgsrc-2007Q4 branch.

This branch celebrates the tenth anniversary of pkgsrc, and we would
like to take this opportunity to thank all of the people who have made
pkgsrc the most portable packaging system in the world - to all of the
users, developers and supporters a very large "Thank you" from all of
us.

Some highlights of the new pkgsrc-2007Q4 branch are:

+ many, many packages have been updated to newer versions, to take
advantage of fixes and improved functionality.  The following versions
of packages are included in the pkgsrc-2007Q4 branch:

        + apache-2.2.6
        + firefox-2.0.0.11
        + gnome-2.20.2
        + kde-3.5.8
        + mysql-5.0.51
        + openoffice-2.3.1
        + opera-9.25
        + postgresql-8.2.5
        + ruby-1.8.6.111
        + samba-3.0.26a
        + seamonkey-1.1.7
        + thunderbird-2.0.0.9
        + wireshark-0.99.7
        + zope 2.9.8, 2.10.5 and 3.3.1

+ other changes include
        + a number of packages have been updated to include "DESTDIR"
          installation, whereby staging areas are used to install the
          package, and a binary package suitable for onward installation
          can be made. The DESTDIR installation  method is completely
          optional. Standard installation is still fully supported,
          and is still the default. Work continues in this area.
          For more information on DESTDIR installation, please refer
          to the pkgsrc guide
        + the addition of a framework for managing binary-only
          packages that require and support binary emulation, by
          Johnny Lam
        + we have continued to develop our "filesystems" category
        + the addition of some pertinent bright, shiny packages such
          as ldapvi, mcast-tools, ssmping, aria2, open-vm-tools,
          jdom, xf86-video-radeonhd, ap2-wsgi, gsnmp, snow, openwbem,
          alephone, oak, thaixfonts, netbiff, awesome, herrie, pixman,
          cstore, sqlgrey, cone, netbsd-iscsi-initiator, whois3,
          psftools, qt4-tiff, rtunes, djview4, fuse-chironfs, climm,
          ilmbase, camlp5, qt4-qdbus, nginx, isc-dhcp, fuse-svnfs, 
          and plone3.

The list of platforms supported by pkgsrc is AIX, BSD/OS, Darwin (Mac
OS X), DragonFly BSD, FreeBSD, HP/UX, IRIX, Interix, Linux, NetBSD,
OSF1, OpenBSD, QNX and SunOS (Solaris).  We are aware that support for
some platforms is at a more mature stage than others, and would like
to encourage feedback from users and developers on our more esoteric
platforms. To illustrate this point, a number of developers have
worked hard to improve support for Mac OS X Leopard - Matthias Scheler
and a number of others have improved support to the point where a
number of key packages like perl and apache are now supported.

+ continuing engineering on the "stable" branch of pkgsrc continues,
and our thanks to the pkgsrc releng team for all the hard work they do
in sanity checking pullup requests, and managing the stable branch
in pkgsrc.

+ constant bulk building on a number of platforms has improved our
ability to identify potential areas of concern, and to correct them
sooner.  It has also improved our ability to make binary packages
available, and we are working on ways to improve this further.  For
more information, please refer to the pkgsrc-bulk mailing list,
archives available at

        http://mail-index.netbsd.org/pkgsrc-bulk/

+ the number of packages has been increased to 7472; the number of
supported platforms is currently 14.  NetBSD, on all its supported
architectures, is considered to be one pkgsrc platform.

As always, we'd like to encourage users of the packages collection to
audit-packages at least every day - this will provide notification of
any packages which are vulnerable to exploit.  As mentioned earlier,
this is part of the new pkg_install tools, and is now much quicker. 
We shall be removing the old package in the next pkgsrc release.  The
pkgsrc-security team do an outstanding job in tracking notifications
of vulnerabilities in packages, and disseminating this information,
and our sincere thanks go to them for this essential work.

We'd also really appreciate it if people would install the
pkgsrc/pkgtools/pkgsurvey package, and then run the pkgsurvey script
for us.  This will forward us a list of the packages installed on that
machine, and the operating system and release level of the operating
system.  The results will be kept confidential, but the output will
help us analyse the packages that are most used.

The source tar files for the new branch can be found at:

        ftp://ftp.NetBSD.org/pub/pkgsrc/pkgsrc-2007Q4/pkgsrc-2007Q4.tar.gz
                or
        ftp://ftp.NetBSD.org/pub/pkgsrc/pkgsrc-2007Q4/pkgsrc-2007Q4.tar.bz2

You can also use the "pkgsrc-2007Q4" tag to check it out yourself from
anoncvs.NetBSD.org or any of the mirrors.

Alistair Crooks
On behalf of the Packages Team
The NetBSD Foundation