Re: Questions about the binary repositories

[Greg Troxel <gdt%lexort.com@localhost>]

Robert Bagdan <kikadf.01%gmail.com@localhost> writes:

> 2) Do these builds run on dedicated build servers, or on developers’
>    own machines?

It varies.  Some are on TNF servers (e.g. x86_64), and some (typically
the older/slower arches, e.g. alpha) are on developers' machines.  Some
of this information is available on pkgsrc-bulk@, which you should
subscribe to if you care about these details.

> 3) Where are the binary packages from pkgsrc trunk/current/HEAD bulk
>    builds, are they available anywhere?

In the past, mef@ has done builds on NetBSD 9 with pkgsrc HEAD (the CVS
term, as that's the authoritative repository :-).  There are no
up-to-date builds, and I removed the old one, which I think was from
2025-02.

Once there's a quarterly build where the branch point is more recent
than the HEAD build, the HEAD build is not useful.  We do not archive or
treat HEAD builds as important.

It is a great contribution that these builds happen, as it leads to
early warning of build problems, but the build products age out of
usefulness quickly.

> 5) When a change is made in the quarterly branch, are only the
>    modified packages rebuilt, or is the entire set rebuilt?

It's just pbulk.  So modified packages, and I think packages that depend
on them.

> 6) After the recent curl update, I noticed that pkgin updated packages
>    from the quarterly binary repo that depended on curl, even though
>    their PKGREVISION hadn’t changed.
>    How did pkgin know to update those as well?

pkgin has a concept of 'refreshed' which I am pretty sure means the
binary package has the same version but a new build date.   If the
PKGREVISION wasn't increased, then in theory the package contents have
not changed.  But pkgin updates them anyway.