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The NetBSD Foundation is pleased to announce the generous donation of
two machines from Sun Microsystems for the purpose of advancing the
development of The NetBSD Packages Collection under Solaris.

The NetBSD Packages Collection, also known as ``pkgsrc'', is a
framework for building third-party software on NetBSD and other
UNIX-like systems, currently containing over 5400 packages.  The
pkgsrc framework was derived from FreeBSD's ports system, and
initially developed for NetBSD only, but has since been ported to a
number of operating systems with Solaris being the oldest non-NetBSD
platform supported by pkgsrc.

Sun Microsystems recognizes the NetBSD Project's portability efforts
and noticed the various advantages of pkgsrc's cross-platform package
management capabilities.  The results of the bulk-builds run by
various volunteers show that already there are over 2000 packages that
build flawlessly under Solaris.

In order to support and further the development efforts of the NetBSD
Packages team, to promote the build of binary packages for Solaris 8,
Solaris 9 and Solaris 10 and to enhance the support of the Sun Forte
Compiler chain, Sun Microsystems has donated one SunBlade 1000 with
2x600mhz SPARCIII processors and one Dell Precision 2650 with 2 x 3GHz
Xeon Processors to the NetBSD Project.  Both machines are running
Solaris 8;  Sun also provided licenses for SunOne Studio 9.

``We are very glad to have received this donation,'' said Jan
Schaumann, a NetBSD developer and System Administrator at Stevens
Institute of Technology, where the machines are hosted. ``Trying to
maintain a cross-platform environment requires a rock-solid and stable
package management system.''

``The NetBSD Packages collection now runs on every major Unix platform
and allows system administrators to keep thousands of third-party
applications easily up-to-date,'' he continues.  ``Having these two
machines available to continually bulk-build all available packages on
two different hardware architectures (x86 and sparc), a commercial OS
sufficiently different from NetBSD and with different compiler tool
chains (gcc and Sun Forte) is an invaluable resource that will point
out where our infrastructure needs improvements.''

``Sun is looking forward to working with the NetBSD Project, and
certainly wants to support the pkgsrc efforts,'' commented Alan DuBoff,
a member of Solaris Engineering at Sun. ``We would very much like to
see pkgsrc build even bigger binary packages such as KDE using the
Forte compiler, which is why we have gladly donated these two
machines.''

``The build machines are running Solaris 8, and coupled with the
excellent history of Solaris binary compatibility, the binary packages
we are providing will run on Solaris 8, 9, 10 and beyond without
modification,'' explained Grant Beattie, the NetBSD developer who set
up the machines and performs the bulk-builds on them. ``pkgsrc's
modular compiler framework allows us to build a large number of
packages with the Sun Forte compiler without modification, even when
packages themselves use gcc-specific options. Also, with a single ABI
variable, we are able to select between 32-bit or 64-bit binaries,
again without any changes required to packages themselves.''

Binary packages resulting from the bulk-builds on these two machines
are uploaded to the NetBSD Project's ftp server, with the reports
being mailed to the pkgsrc-bulk mailing list
(http://www.NetBSD.org/MailingLists/#pkgsrc-bulk).

Further information about the NetBSD Project and the NetBSD Packages
collection is available online at http://www.NetBSD.org and
http://www.pkgsrc.org respectively.  For general information about
Sun's Solaris Operating System, see http://www.sun.com/solaris/.

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