I'm considering switching from Linux to NetBSD and one of the steps
preceding my installation is to check wether all the software I need
is
available. Hence, I was browsing through the available packages and
couldn't find Chromium and Firefox is not up-to-date. That seems
awkward,
so I'm confused. Are there no up-to-date-ports for the open-source
browsers?
Linux, along with Windows and Mac, is considered a first-tier target
for most open-source projects, so the project itself distributes the
binary versions that most people install. NetBSD doesn't have that
luxury. The complaint here is the flip-side of what is usually
touted
as FOSS's greatest strength: there's the source, build it yourself.
We not only "get to" build it ourselves, we "have to" do it.
The pkgsrc system gets updated approximately quarterly, so there's
potential for at least a 3-month lag from that, plus the time it
takes
to port updates into the framework before the cut-off for those
releases before that (which can be quite significant for large
packages like Firefox, especially considering the multi-platform
nature of pkgsrc), and then after the release there's the time it
takes to rebuild all the packages from that. Given all these
factors,
being as much as 6 months behind "cutting edge" for even a major
software packages like these doesn't surprise me.
That might be a stupid question, but well I'm a newbie ;)
Not stupid at all. If you have any skill at programming, you might
consider helping out with pkgsrc. If you have a favorite package
that
you feel needs updating, dive in and do it. It's often not all that
hard.