Subject: Re: .tar.gz archives for NetBSD user space
To: Jeremy C. Reed <reed@reedmedia.net>
From: Aleksey Cheusov <cheusov@tut.by>
List: tech-userlevel
Date: 12/16/2006 18:25:26
 >> I would like to create pkgsrc packages for some of NetBSD user space 
 >> utilities.
> Sounds fine.
It's easy to do but...

 >> But I cannot find archives for them at NetBSD ftp site.

> Someone has to volunteer to do this.
What I see is that those who did this once forgot to update these version.
One example:
http://www.fawlty.net/software/
There NetBSD grep sources are available, dated 2004 year.
It is completely unusable, see PR 35222, while NetBSD-3.1 version
seems to work corectly.
The same for awk, see PR 33392, latest upstream version is buggy
while NetBSD-4-beta version works fine for me.
Also, lang/nawk and textproc/nbsed
keeps sources in files/ subdirectory for bootstrap purposes,
this is bad thing I think, ot at least this not I expected from pkgsrc.
Separate lang/nawk from pkgtools/bootstrap-awk, and
   textsproc/nbsed from pkgtools/bootstrap-sed.

 >> It will be ideal if NetBSD team provide something like this:
 >> ftp://ftp.NetBSD.org/pub/utils/netbsd-grep-2.0.0.tar.bz
 >> ftp://ftp.NetBSD.org/pub/utils/netbsd-grep-2.0.1.tar.bz
 >> ftp://ftp.NetBSD.org/pub/utils/netbsd-grep-2.1.0.tar.bz
 >> ...
 >> ftp://ftp.NetBSD.org/pub/utils/netbsd-awk-2.0.0.tar.bz
 >> ftp://ftp.NetBSD.org/pub/utils/netbsd-awk-2.0.1.tar.bz

> What do these numbers mean? The NetBSD release version?
Yes. Exactly.

> I was thinking there was already a package of NetBSD's own grep, but I 
> don't see it.
Yes, gnu grep is available and broken BSD grep.

> NetBSD's official grep if from GNU. Use pkgsrc/sysutils/coreutils version 
> of grep.  (src/usr.bin/grep is available but not official yet.)
I know this, this is not my question.

> NetBSD's official awk is nawk (version 20050424) which is also in 
> pkgsrc/lang/nawk/.
Not exactly. Time to time, *bsd developers make changes I need.

 >> Is it possible? Or is there more elegant way to download sources
 >> other than file by file using cvs?

> Usually someone grabs some snapshot of the source. They customize to make 
> it easily buildable on other platforms and/or provide installation 
> documentation. Give it some version. And tar it up. There are examples in 
> our pkgsrc.
I know how to do this and of course I can do this myself by opening
another project on sf.net/nongnu.org/my_friendly_server
and periodically updating them as soon as NetBSD
makes new release. My question is why not to do
this officially (by NetBSD developers, even without any extra changes
for better portability, just NetBSD sources as they are).
In this case, pkgsrc packages
like netbsd-awk, netbsd-grep etc. gives NetBSD users an easy way
to upgrade/downgrade tools without recompiling them from NetBSD CVS tree
and all other
users (*bsd, linux, solaris, interix or whatever)
to use netbsd utils instead of native ones, just like
sysutils/coreutils and wip/heirloom

-- 
Best regards, Aleksey Cheusov.