Summary of Changes to the NetBSD Packages Collection in April 2001
==================================================================

[For a full list of the changes, please see the following URL:
	http://mail-index.netbsd.org/current-users/2001/05/02/0010.html
- agc]

By my calculations, as of 30th April 2001, there were 2088 packages in
the NetBSD packages collection, up from 1992 last month.

We've been quite busy during the month of April:  the main change to
the infrastructure was the new distinfo file, located in a package's
main directory, which combines the files/md5 and files/patch-sum
information, as well as containing the distfile sizes.  For most
packages, the files/ directory has now disappeared, and we've reduced
the inode count by over 1000, so extraction of files from
pkgsrc.tar.gz should now be quicker. In addition, you can also see how
much data you will be downloading before you hit <Return>, simply by
looking in the distinfo file.

Packages added to the collection in April include:  avifile, cdpack
(you'll need this if you're making CDs with binary packages on them;
thanks, Dan), csound-bath, cvsweb, dvdview, linpack, mgv, myodbc,
odbc-postgresql, openjade, numerous Perl 5 utilities, PalmOS
development tools (thanks, Thomas), saxon, suse_vmware (thanks,
Matthias), w3m-m17n, wmfishtime and xservers.

Updated packages include:  adzap, amaya, apache and apache-current,
auctex, audit-packages, bash, blackdown-jdk13, bonobo, chasen,
coda-client, communicator, curl, cvs, devtodo, epic4, esound, eterm,
fetchmail and fetchmailconf, GConf, ggv, glade, gnome (thanks, Rene),
gtk, hanterm, htmllint, hylafax, isakmpd, libtool (thanks, Nick), mad
(used to be madplay), majordomo, mew (which was beaten in the
most-updated package award by pkglint), navigator, noweb, nxtvepg,
openssl, opera, ORBit, various Perl 5 utilities, pchar, pgpdump,
pkgconflict (thanks, Lex), postfix, proj, psmisc, pth, racoon, rpc2,
rvm, samba, sawfish, scilab, squid, squirrelmail, sudo, sun-jdk and
sun-jre, verilog-current, wwwoffle, and zsh.

Package of the Month:  My vote goes to cdpack - an ingenious best-fit
utility for placing binary packages onto CDs, written by Dan McMahill. 
Dan himself nominated pkgconflict (pkgsrc/pkgtools/pkgconflict), which
uses the results of bulk builds to tell us which packages cannot be
installed at the same time because they install similarly-named files. 
This is a considerable help to all of the packages team, and to pkgsrc
in general.  Jim Wise nominated devtodo (pkgsrc/time/devtodo) - "in
addition to providing a nice hierarchical view of todo tasks, it can
export a todo list to a text file in a more-or-less traditional
format."

Since the end of February, Thomas Klausner has been waging war on the
pkgsrc-related problem reports, and has succeeded in closing more than
half of them.  His work is greatly appreciated by all of us, as ever,
and I would like to thank him once again for improving the packages
collection so much.

And, finally a word of congratulations from all of us to Dan McMahill,
who successfully defended his thesis at MIT, and has now received his
Ph.D.  Well done, Dan.


Alistair Crooks (agc@netbsd.org)
Wed May  2 07:15:19 BST 2001