Re: Getting the latest pkgsrc.tar.gz

["Rakhesh Sasidharan" <rakheshster%gmail.com@localhost>]

Hello Roland,

My bad, I was looking at the wrong place. I see that you have updated
the pkgsrc guide
(http://www.netbsd.org/Documentation/pkgsrc/getting.html) with the
discussions here. :) Thanks!

Here's the changes I see:

1) The location of the tarball has been updated to
"ftp://ftp.netbsd.org/pub/pkgsrc/"; and its layout has been explained.
Also, a distinction has been made between the current branch had the
stable branch. Neat! :)

2) The section on setting the environmental variables for CVS has been
updated to include Bash. This is a place where I had stumbled myself
(I use Bash, so SETENV didn't work, but then I knew how to set
variables in Bash and so managed).

3) Its clear now that I can update using CVS even if I began with the
tarball. :)

4) I am not clear on this warning btw: "Updating from tar file cannot
detect or preserve any changes you have done to your local copy of
pkgsrc. Therefore updating via CVS is strongly recommended." Could you
elaborate please?

5) There's nothing wrong in this line on updating pkgsrc -- "The "-d"
option fetches new packages (which is curiously not done by default),"
-- but I have a concern nevertheless. It kind of gives the simplified
impression that "cvs -q update" is the pkgsrc updating command, and
"-d" is the option to fetch new packages -- which is misleading.

If I were writing the document, I'd have let out that line coz I
prefer giving no info as compared to a simplified possibly misleading
info. And except for this line, nowhere else do we give more info
about the options (eg. "-P" earlier during checkout, or "-A" later
when changing branches). Maybe I'd have added an appendix section or
something giving a summary of these CVS commands (checkout/ update)
and their options (-r, -P, -A, -q) and related files (CVS/Tags and
CVS/Entries) -- essentially, just the CVS stuff that pertains to
pkgsrc. That way the interested reader can get a better idea of what's
happening when he/ she types these CVS commands; while the casual
reader is not given any simplified view.

Thanks for updating the document though. Compared to when I read it a
week ago, a lot of things are clearer now. Glad to see the questions
asked in this thread is going a long way to help future users. :)

Rakhesh

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