On Tue, 3 Feb 1998, James O'Kane wrote:

> Now, that I have my machine up and running, I have various questions that I
> haven't seen answered in any of my readings.
> 
> 1) Are there any ports of Emacs, Pine, and Samba?

Pine 3.95 or 96 compile right out of the box. You just have to build them
for the "neb" platform.

> 3) How does the porting process in general work from the 'official' version
> to pmax? Is it a strict they do something first and then we port it? The
> reason I ask is that I'm not too fond of the way the installation process
> works for packages. Is that something that's passed down to us? I'd like to
> have more control over what gets installed and what doesn't. If you're
> familiar with Red Hat Linux, you'll know about their rpm setup. It's a
> little bit fancier than just a tar.gz as it allows for execution of setup
> scripts, removal of packages, listings of who rolled the package, PGP
> signing, and other cool stuff.

The "official" version? There's only one NetBSD source tree. Under Linux,
things are VERY different between ports. Under NetBSD, we try to keep
things the same. The only differences reflect either an elf vs a.out
split, or temporary port problems. For instance, I usually compile both
i386 and mac68k binaries from the same source tree.

I think the packages you're refering to were the ones in the initial
instalation (you mention tar.gz files). Those are just different sections
of the OS, not packages a la rpm. They contain programs and files created
from the 1.3 source tree. No one should have changed that source, so you
don't need to know who did it.

NetBSD also just started using the package system, which is a modified
form of the FreeBSD ports system (we use the word port to mean a hardware
platform, not a port of a software program). For these, you just download
either built packages (which I've not used) or package source. If the
latter, you cd to the directory for the program you want, type "make", and
the computer builds the program. First it'll download the source code,
patch it, configure it, then build it.

Installing these packages works something like rpm in that an add command
builds a database of what's installed, and a delete command will go in and
zap all the installed files.

Take care,

Bill