On Fri, 20 Apr 2007, Mark Blackman wrote:

> I'm also a little unclear on the relationship between pkgsrc and
> pkgsrc-wip if anyone feels generous enough with their time to
> give me some clearer clues than the ones I've found online.

wip is "work in progress"

pkgsrc-wip is a place for new pkgsrc developers and also experienced 
pkgsrc developers to practice building packages, share packages, develop 
new packages, etc. Packages are sometimes created at pkgsrc-wip and then 
later imported to real pkgsrc.

pkgsrc-wip is hosted at sourceforge.

pkgsrc is hosted by NetBSD. NetBSD developers commit to it there. In most 
cases, these packages are maintained by NetBSD developers (but some 
packages are maintained by non-developers who share diffs for updates).

pkgsrc has the goal to track stable, known to work, and usually official 
software. In some cases, it provides packages for unofficial software, but 
they are usually named -devel or similar, or the maintainer of the package 
has a good reason to use it instead.

pkgsrc-wip may make packages for beta packages.

Some NetBSD developers never use pkgsrc-wip, but some use it a lot. (I 
have used pkgsrc-wip for over a hundred packages.)

In some cases, pkgsrc-wip and pkgsrc may have some identical packages and 
sometimes pkgsrc-wip may be out of date.

If you want to learn about pkgsrc development, please join pkgsrc-wip and 
practice.

  Jeremy C. Reed