Announcing the pkgsrc-2006Q4 branch

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

The pkgsrc-2006Q4 Branch
========================

The pkgsrc developers are very proud to announce the new pkgsrc-2006Q4
branch, which has support for more packages than previous branches. 
As well as updated versions of many packages, the infrastructure of
pkgsrc itself has been improved for better platform and compiler
support, and also for enhanced security.

At the same time, the pkgsrc-2006Q3 branch has been deprecated, and
continuing engineering starts on the pkgsrc-2006Q4 branch.

Some highlights of the new pkgsrc-2006Q4 branch are:

+ many, many packages have been updated to newer versions, to take
advantage of fixes and improved functionality.  This includes

        + gnome-2.16.1
        + kde-3.5.5
        + opera-9.10
        + postgresql-8.2.0
        + seamonkey-1.0.7 and firefox-2.0.0.1
        + thunderbird-1.5.0.9
        + zope-3.3.0
        + ruby-1.8.5.20061205
        + wireshark-0.99.4
        + apache-2.2.3

+ other changes include
        + modular X11 packages have been added, although they should
          be considered "work in progress"
        + the ghostscript packages have been reworked to bring them up
          to date
        + the addition of some pertinent bright, shiny packages such
          as arena, squirm, swatch, fann, checkperms, pam-radius, rails,
          kenigma, ncursesw, etrace, xentools30-hvm, wpa_gui, memtestplus,
          firefox2, xmorph, ap-modsecurity2, opencv, fwbuilder21, pciids,
          gnupg2, g95, epdfview, i810switch, gnash, kaffeine, and
          DarwinStreamingServer.

The full list of platforms supported by pkgsrc is:  AIX, BSD/OS,
Darwin (Mac OS X), DragonFly BSD, FreeBSD, IRIX, Interix, Linux,
NetBSD, OSF1, OpenBSD, and SunOS (Solaris).  We would also like to add
support for more platforms - please get in touch if you, too, are
interested.

+ continuing engineering on the "stable" branches of pkgsrc has been
much improved, and our thanks to the pkgsrc releng team for all the
hard work they do in sanity checking pullup requests, and managing
the stable branches in pkgsrc.

+ constant bulk building on a number of platforms has improved our
ability to identify potential areas of concern, and to correct them
sooner.  It has also improved our ability to make binary packages
available, and we are working on ways to improve this further.  For
more information, please refer to the pkgsrc-bulk mailing list,
archives available at

        http://mail-index.netbsd.org/pkgsrc-bulk/

+ the number of packages has been increased to 6408; the number of
supported platforms continues to be 12.  NetBSD, on all its supported
architectures, is considered to be one pkgsrc platform.

As always, we'd like to encourage users of the packages collection to
install and run pkgsrc/security/audit-packages at least every day -
this will provide notification of any packages which are vulnerable to
exploit.  The pkgsrc-security team do a marvellous job in tracking
notifications of vulnerabilities in packages, and disseminating this
information, and our sincere thanks go to them for this essential work.

We'd also really appreciate it if people would install the
pkgsrc/pkgtools/pkgsurvey package, and then run the pkgsurvey script
for us.  This will forward us a list of the packages installed on that
machine, and the operating system and release level of the operating
system.  The results will be kept confidential, but the output will
help us analyse the packages that are most used.

The source tar files for the new branch can be found at:

        ftp://ftp.NetBSD.org/pub/pkgsrc/pkgsrc-2006Q4/pkgsrc-2006Q4.tar.gz
                or
        ftp://ftp.NetBSD.org/pub/pkgsrc/pkgsrc-2006Q4/pkgsrc-2006Q4.tar.bz2

You can also use the "pkgsrc-2006Q4" tag to check it out yourself from
anoncvs.NetBSD.org or any of the mirrors.

Alistair Crooks
On behalf of the Packages Team
The NetBSD Foundation