The pkgsrc-2005Q3 Branch
========================

The pkgsrc developers are very proud to announce the new pkgsrc-2005Q3
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, and also for enhanced security.

At the same time, the pkgsrc-2005Q2 branch has been deprecated, and
continuing engineering starts on the pkgsrc-2005Q3 branch.

Some highlights of the new pkgsrc-2005Q3 branch are:

+ many, many packages have been updated to newer versions, to take
advantage of fixes and improved functionality.  This includes

	+ firefox-1.0.7
	+ gnome-2.10.2
	+ kde-3.4.2
	+ opera-8.5 
	+ perl-5.8.7
	+ postgresql 8.0
	+ the addition of some pertinent bright, shiny packages such
	  as jalbum, spamd, archangel, freefont-ttf, cvm, js, ucon64,
	  pwsafe, luma, nss_ldap, ghostscript-afpl, lighttpd, dejavu-ttf
	+ more of Johnny Lam's infrastructure changes  
	+ Krister Walfridsson's cross-package work, which allows the
	  building of packages on different platforms

The full list of platforms supported by pkgsrc is:  AIX, BSD/OS,
Darwin (MacOS X), DragonFly, FreeBSD, IRIX, Interix, Linux, NetBSD,
OSF1, OpenBSD, SunOS (Solaris), and UnixWare.  We would like to add
support for more - please get in touch if you, too, are interested.

Our thanks also to the Dragonfly BSD project for adopting pkgsrc as
their packaging system - this is the first pkgsrc branch since that
announcement, and we have brought on board some Dragonfly developers
specifically to look after issues related to that platform.

+ removed some older, unmaintained or vulnerable packages, such as
realplayer, cxunzip, yamt, evolution12, gtksamba, gdm1, prc-tools,
palmos-includes, and winelib. 

+ continuing engineering on the "stable" branches of pkgsrc has been
much improved, and our thanks to the pkgsrc releng team for all the
hard work they do in sanity checking pullup requests, and managing
the stable branches in pkgsrc

+ constant bulk building on a number of platforms (see the pkgsrc-bulk
mailing list) 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

+ the number of packages has been increased to 5551; the number of
supported platforms continues to be 13.  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
install and run pkgsrc/security/audit-packages at least every day -
this will provide notification of any packages which are vulnerable
to exploit.

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/2005Q3/pkgsrc-2005Q3.tar.gz
		or
	ftp://ftp.NetBSD.org/pub/pkgsrc/2005Q3/pkgsrc-2005Q3.tar.bz2

You can also use the "pkgsrc-2005Q3" 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