NetBSD pkg's (was: Re: 13-Beta CV643d)

[Ignatios Souvatzis <ignatios%theory.cs.uni-bonn.de@localhost>]

Sven Differt wondered:

> I would like to know if there are other software resources for NetBSD/Amiga
> than the NetBSD-Mirrors with their contrib-dirs.

Well, first of all, NetBSD ships with a working C/C++/ObjC compiler...
so any Unixoid source distribution of some software could be used, if you
are prepared to possibly invest some time to make changes for OS differences.

However (beginning with NetBSD-1.3), for a couple of software packages,
this has already been done, and a "pkg" has been built. A source
distribution of a pkg contains short description, source locations,
list of pkges it depends on, patches to apply and configuration options
to use... basically, if you are connected to The Net, you can just

cd /usr/pkgsrc/some/dir; make install

and all packages it depends on, and its own sources, will be fetched, patched,
configured, compiled and installed. (This works (for most pkg's) for any
NetBSD architecture.)

[If you are NOT connected, you can fetch the sources manually by other
methods, store them in /usr/pkgsrc/distfiles, and retry].

CD-ROM distributors (or others with enough disk space) might choose to
build [a subset of] the pkgs and provide them as binary pkg'es, which you
just install with "pkg_add".

Regards,
        Ignatios Souvatzis