Announcing the pkgsrc-2014Q4 Branch

[Alistair Crooks <agc%pkgsrc.org@localhost>]

pkgsrc-2014Q4
=============
The pkgsrc team is proud to announce the availability of the
pkgsrc-2014Q4 branch.  We welcome some new gnuradio packages, say
hello to suse-12.1 emulation, and say farewell to libreoffice3.
 
Number of Packages
==================
In pkgsrc, there are:
 
15510 possible pkgsrc packages in pkgsrc-2014Q4
12449 pkgsrc entries as reported by lintpkgsrc (unique package Makefiles)
15049 binary packages built with clang for NetBSD-current/x86_64
14430 binary packages built with gcc for NetBSD-6.0/x86_64
12972 binary packages built with gcc for Joyent's SmartOS/x86_64
 
In addition, this quarter:
156 packages have been added
4 packages have been renamed
48 packages removed, 9 with a successor
1575 packages updated

Looking at the total annual changes made to pkgsrc, 2014 was a pretty
good year:

	1997:	184
	1998:	908
	1999:	1490
	2000:	2110
	2001:	3014
	2002:	4337
	2003:	5506
	2004:	6744
	2005:	5869
	2006:	5740
	2007:	4934
	2008:	5915
	2009:	6369
	2010:	6236
	2011:	5446
	2012:	6212
	2013:	6845
	2014:	6406

Not as many packages changed as 2013 or 2004, but this year's
activity ranked third out of the seventeen years that pkgsrc has been
in existence - our thanks to the pkgsrc contributors and developers.

Pkgsrc Release Schedule
=======================
The pkgsrc developers make a new release every three months.  We
believe that this is a sweet spot between too many updates, and
keeping abreast of issues like security vulnerabilities.  Pkgsrc is
not tied to any one operating system or architecture, which gives us
the ability to decouple the releases from any operating system
releases, and to concentrate on the packages themselves.
 
This is the 45th quarterly release of pkgsrc.
 
Changes to pkgsrc
=================
Ryosuke Moro continues to improve our haskell package support. 
Many pkgsrc developers and contributors have all helped with PR
submissions, fixes and bug reports.
 
Package Additions
=================
New packages for afl, capstone, suse-12.1 emulation packages, hitori,
gnuradio, guile-2.0, cgit, and rekonq were added.  We also gained
more python, perl, haskell, and ruby wrappers for many libraries.
 
Package Removals
================
We actively manage the packages in pkgsrc, and delete ones that are
not necessary.  We said goodbye to libreoffice3 and skype1 and skype21
for this branch.
 
Other Changes
=============
We have introduced a new definition, PKGSRC_KEEP_BIN_PKGS, which
allows the decision to keep binary packages to be set using a
definition. More progress has been made on integrating cwrappers,
and we expect this to continue next quarter.
 
Pkgsrc-security
===============
One neat feature of pkgsrc is its ability to sort package versions
based on the version numbers.  It's used in audit-packages, to report
on any installed packages which may have security vulnerabilities in
them.  pkgsrc-security%pkgsrc.org@localhost maintains lists of vulnerable
packages, along with reference URLs relating to the exposure.  We
thank the whole pkgsrc-security team for their hard work.  Sample
output from audit-packages is shown below:
 
% audit-packages
Package git-base-1.9.4 has a client-code-execution-from-hostile-server vulnerability, see http://cve.mitre.org/cgi-bin/cvename.cgi?name=CVE-2014-9390
%
 
Getting pkgsrc
==============
More information can be found in
        http://www.netbsd.org/docs/pkgsrc/getting.html
 
tar files for pkgsrc, along with checksums, can be found at
        http://ftp.netbsd.org/pub/pkgsrc/pkgsrc-2014Q4/
 
and anonymous cvs can be used:
        cvs -z3 -q -d anoncvs%anoncvs.NetBSD.org@localhost:/cvsroot checkout -r 
pkgsrc-2014Q4 -P pkgsrc
 
or by pulling from the git mirrors at:
        https://github.com/jsonn/pkgsrc
        https://github.com/joyent/pkgsrc
or the mercurial mirror at:
	https://bitbucket.org/agc/pkgsrc.hg
 
About pkgsrc
============
pkgsrc is a cross-platform packaging system.  It allows people to
download sources and to build and install binary packages on one or
more platforms.
 
Building packages from source is useful for a number of reasons:
 
+ not only is the provenance of source code checked (by using multiple
digests), with pkgsrc, the version of source code you are working
with is the same that other developers and users have.
 
+ package builders can choose to customise their own installations by
means of the option framework.  pre-built packages from other builders
may not have specified the same options.
 
+ patches are maintained in a central repository, and, again, are
checked at patch application time by using digests. The patches
which are applied to the sources being built are the same ones which
are known to be used and proved by other pkgsrc users (not necessarily
on the same platform).
 
+ by building from source, all doubts about compilers, build practices,
source code cleanliness, and packaging differences are removed. 
Digital signatures of binary packages, while useful in themselves,
only prove certain aspects of binary package provenance. (pkgsrc has
had signed packages since 2001.)
 
+ it may be difficult or impossible to find a pre-built package for
the operating system or architecture.
 
+ a pre-built package may have further or conflicting pre-requisites,
which are themselves difficult to find or build. By building everything,
including pre-requisites, a from-source packaging system can ensure
that pre-requisites are present and integrated.
 
At the present time, pkgsrc supports 22 platforms:
 
        AIX
        BSDOS
        Cygwin
        Darwin/Mac OS X
        DragonFly
        FreeBSD
        FreeMiNT
        GNU/kFreeBSD
        HPUX
        Haiku
        IRIX
        Interix/SFU/SUA
        Linux
        Minix3
        MirBSD
        NetBSD
        OSF1
        OpenBSD
        QNX
        SCO OpenServer
        Solaris/illumos
        UnixWare
 
Complete dependency and pre-requisite package information is held and
used by the package management software - if packages rely on other
packages to function properly, that pre-requisite will be built,
installed and managed as part of the package installation process. 
Binary packages can be managed using pkgin.
 
Alistair Crooks
On behalf of the pkgsrc developers
Mon Dec 29 17:17:39 PST 2014