Announcing the pkgsrc-2008Q1 Branch

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

The pkgsrc-2008Q1 Branch
========================

The pkgsrc developers are very proud to announce the new pkgsrc-2008Q1
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-2007Q4 branch has been deprecated, and
continuing engineering starts on the pkgsrc-2008Q1 branch.

With more than ten years of pkgsrc development behind us, 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-2008Q1 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-2008Q1 branch:

        + apache-2.2.8
        + firefox-2.0.0.13
        + gnome-2.20.2
        + kde-3.5.9
        + mysql-5.0.51
        + openoffice-2.3.1nb5
        + opera-9.26
        + postgresql-8.3.0
        + ruby-1.8.6.114
        + samba-3.0.28a
        + seamonkey-1.1.9
        + wireshark-1.0.0
        + zope-3.3.1

+ other changes include
        + we have revamped our mono package, and added a number of
          other useful mono-based packages
        + the addition of some interesting, pertinent, and shiny
          packages such as 3proxy, bash-completion, bsdav, ccid,
          chrpath, clawsker, clive, cmconvert, CoolKey, cut, cvsclone,
          dansguardian, dmsdos, dvtm, dynamips, ejabberd, ewipe,
          gnome-platform, gnome-sharp, gtksourceview2, highlight, im,
          isc-dhcp4, libarena, libdatrie, libdmenu, libfetch, libixp,
          libmp3splt, libotf, libspf2, libssh2, libthai, metauml,
          migemo, mono-addins, monodevelop, monodoc, mopac, msynctool,
          ossp-js, pcc-current, pdcurses, portmap, postgresql-8.3,
          puppet, rtf2latex2e, ruby-activeresource, SDL_Pango,
          sigscheme, slock, smirk, unfs3, wbxml2, xbacklight, xinput,
          xmltoman, and yabause

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" branches of pkgsrc has been
revitalised, and we have recruited 3 times the number of engineers to
work on this than we previously had.  Our thanks go 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 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 7578; 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 a marvellous 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-2008Q1/pkgsrc-2008Q1.tar.gz
                or
        ftp://ftp.NetBSD.org/pub/pkgsrc/pkgsrc-2008Q1/pkgsrc-2008Q1.tar.bz2

You can also use the "pkgsrc-2008Q1" 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