It's probably not well known amongst NetBSD users, but I've been developing a universal packaging system for *nix platforms for the last several years, but only supporting x86-64 right now. At one time, one could build packages for DragonFly, FreeBSD, Solaris 10, MacOS/Darwin, NetBSD, and Linux. MacOS support was dropped because Mach-o was a pain and I lost access to a good build machine. Solaris 10 support is stale, but I plan to bootstrap OmniOS soon in order to provide packages for Illumos systems (hopefully OmniOS, OpenIndiana and SmartOS).
Since Ravenports natively supports subpackages, package counts between repositories can not be directly compared. For example, FreeBSD ports created 7 ports (so 7 packages) for one release of postgresql while we have 1 port with 11 subpackages to package the same files. Similarly, VLC with its plugins takes over 50 ports/packages on FreeBSD while Ravenports captures this with a single port of 57 subpackages.
The currency of the ports is impressive. It's consistently at the very top of Repology currency list ("By percentage of up to date projects"), ranging from 95-99% currency typically.
see:
https://repology.org/That is to say, for ports we have in common with pkgsrc, Ravenports typically features much newer releases. For those curious, browse the catalog:
https://www.ravenports.com/catalog/The (basically static) web site is here:
https://www.ravenports.com/Quick start instructions are in a couple of places:
Instructions for quick downloader:
https://www.ravenports.com/repository/___README___.txtMore in-depth instructions (may need improvements):
https://github.com/Ravenports/Ravenports/wiki/quickstart-netbsdWork-in-progress wiki:
https://github.com/Ravenports/Ravenports/wikiRecently somebody requested we open discussions at Github and that's been working really well. I just created a section specifically for NetBSD users there:
https://github.com/orgs/Ravenports/discussions/categories/netbsdI don't really want to get into a compare-and-contrast discussion with pkgsrc, but I guess a few bullets are needed.
- Intended primarily as binary package management.
Yes, one can build every single package themselves if they want to. There's nothing stopping you. There's just no real benefit to doing it assuming the master package repository is frequently up to date. Ravenports specifications *do* support options like you see in pkgsrc and FreeBSD ports, but it is not that common. The reason why is because not only does Ravenports support subpackages natively, it also supports "variants" natively. In FreeBSD-speak, those are "flavors". So one port can produce multiple package sets. So if there's a distinct need for different option settings, we simply create multiple variants so people can select the package with the build options they need. So the main reason users of other package system to "build your own" almost doesn't exist in Ravenports.
- New package manager called "rvn"
This package manager is written in Ada. In function, it heavily resembles the FreeBSD "pkg" package manager. Differences have emerged, but if one is familiar with "pkg" they will be right at home with "rvn".
- Extremely fast
I have not used pkgsrc in many years, so I can't speak to that. But building an index on the entire FreeBSD ports tree takes anywhere from 8 to 30 minutes on a modest machine. To build the index on Ravenports on the same machine takes 1 to 2 seconds. Similar performance is seen with purging obsolete distribution files and logs.
- Ravenadm builds multiple packages in parallel naturally.
If anyone is familiar with the FreeBSD Synth tool (which I wrote many years ago), they will find the same interface with ravenadm. It's both ncurses-based and web-based, tracking many builders (up to 128) that tracks multiple simultaneous builds with almost no set up. For beefy machines you might configure it for 9 builders each with 10 parallel jobs.
NetBSD support of Ravenports is in great shape. I think the only port that's not building right now is lldb. I also need to push thunderbird 138.0 to the repo tonight that had a linking issue this morning.
We've got no NetBSD contributors. The main problem with this is I am sure we are missing paxctl support in several packages. We'd be thrilled if a NetBSD afficionado or two would help make NetBSD support better -- something along the line of frequent builds to identify recent breakage and providing NetBSD-specific tweaks so as paxctl and probably some patching (I admit to raiding pkgsrc patches for NetBSD build fixes fairly often).
anyway ---
if you use NetBSD/AMD64 (release 10.0 or greater) and you are interested in exploring a new package option, check Ravenports out. I'd say use the Github Discussion area for specific questions and assistance. I'd love to get feedback. We've been maintaining NetBSD packages for at least 2 years, but I didn't want to announce anything until rvn hit the 1.0.0 milestone.
Regards,
John Marino