The pkgsrc-2004Q4 Branch
========================

The pkgsrc developers are very proud to announce the new pkgsrc-2004Q4
branch, which has support for more packages, and on more platforms,
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 for forthcoming development.

At the same time, the pkgsrc-2004Q3 branch has been deprecated, and
continuing engineering starts on the pkgsrc-2004Q4 branch.

Some highlights of the new pkgsrc-2004Q4 branch are:

+ support for new platforms in pkgsrc

	o OSF1
	o DragonFly BSD

The full list of platforms supported by pkgsrc is now:  AIX, BSD/OS,
Darwin (MacOS X), DragonFly, FreeBSD, IRIX, Interix, Linux, NetBSD,
OSF1, OpenBSD, SunOS (Solaris), and UnixWare

+ improved infrastructure for non-NetBSD platforms, including 64-bit
variants of some operating systems, whilst continuing to keep NetBSD
as the main target platform

+ improved support for non-gcc compilers

+ continuing engineering on the "stable" branches of pkgsrc has been
much improved

+ 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

+ the number of packages has been increased to 5209; the number of
supported platforms has been raised to 13.  NetBSD, on all its
supported architectures, is considered to be one pkgsrc platform.

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

	o gnome-2.8.1
	o kde-3.3.2
	o mysql-4.1.7
	o perl-5.8.5
	o postgres-7.4.6
	o python-2.4
	o openldap-2.2.18

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.

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

	ftp://ftp.NetBSD.org/pub/pkgsrc/2004Q4/pkgsrc-2004Q4.tar.gz
	ftp://ftp.NetBSD.org/pub/pkgsrc/2004Q4/pkgsrc-2004Q4.tar.bz2

and you can use the "pkgsrc-2004Q4" tag to check it out yourself from
anoncvs.NetBSD.org and any of the mirrors.

Alistair Crooks
On behalf of the Packages Team
The NetBSD Foundation