Re: Old version of NetBSD and pkgsrc archives

[David Holland <dholland-mips%netbsd.org@localhost>]

On Wed, Apr 29, 2015 at 05:51:48PM -0400, Larry Stotler wrote:
 > I found the older versions of NetBSD, but I'm uncertain of what to do
 > about pkgsrc.  I have no idea if(& doubt it will) the current version
 > of pkgsrc would run on this older version.  And even so, I don't know
 > if any of the programs listed in the current pkgsrc list would be able
 > to be installed either.

I would just use current pkgsrc. It should more or less run, though
you'll need to bootstrap as 1.6's make is nothing like recent enough.
We don't intentionally desupport old netbsd versions, though some
problems might appear.

How much you'll be able to build (or have the patience to build) is
another question. If you have a faster build host, try setting up
pkgsrc crosscompilation on it; it's not clear how much that will
support either but it'll be much faster when it works. (Although, I'm
not sure it's possible to do this with that old a netbsd version...)

I'm pretty sure there are not going to be any prebuilt packages for
1.6 left for download - sufficiently old packages get flushed from
time to time for space reasons.

I would recommend putting some protective logic in mk.conf along these
lines:

   .if !empty(.CURDIR:M*/lang/gcc*) || \
       !empty(.CURDIR:M*/security/heimdal) || \
	  ...
   PKG_FAIL_REASON+=Nope.
   .endif

so you don't end up accidentally building large things that are
unlikely to be useful. This is particularly true if you aren't that
experienced with pkgsrc, as it's not always that easy to know up front
what will trigger what else.

You can also fish older versions of packaged software out of the
pkgsrc CVS history; although going back as far as the 1.6 era will
likely lead to problems due to pkgsrc infrastructure changes over the
years. Also distfiles for really old versions of things may be no
longer available.

-- 
David A. Holland
dholland%netbsd.org@localhost