[ANNOUNCEMENT] The pkgsrc-2009Q3 branch

[Alistair Crooks <agc@xxxxxxxxxx>]

The pkgsrc-2009Q3 Branch
========================

The pkgsrc developers are happy to announce the new pkgsrc-2009Q3
branch, which has support for even 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.

At the same time, the pkgsrc-2009Q2 branch has been deprecated, and
continuing engineering starts on the pkgsrc-2009Q3 branch.

Some highlights of the new pkgsrc-2009Q3 branch are:

+ the pkg_install infrastructure has been updated again
+ kde4 is available in pkgsrc for the very first time
+ Matthias Scheler has provided initial support for Mac OS X Snow Leopard 
+ many, many packages have been updated to newer versions, to take
  advantage of fixes and improved functionality.  The following
  versions of packages are included in the pkgsrc-2009Q3 branch:

	+ apache-2.2.13nb3
	+ firefox-3.5.3
	+ git-1.6.4
	+ gnome-2.26.2nb1
	+ kde-3.5.10nb4 and 4.3.1
	+ mercurial-1.3.1
	+ mysql-5.0.67nb3
	+ openoffice-3.1.1
	+ perl-5.10.0nb6
	+ postgresql-8.3.8 and postgresql-8.4.1
	+ python-2.5.4nb3 and python-2.6.2nb1
	+ ruby-1.8.7.174nb2
	+ samba-3.0.37
	+ seamonkey-1.1.18
	+ subversion-1.6.5
	+ wireshark-1.2.2
	+ zope-3.3.1

+ other notable changes include
	+ we bid a fond thanks, and farewell, to some old favourites,
	  such as postgresql-8.1, sendmail-8.1.3, python-2.3, and openpbs
	+ the addition of some interesting, pertinent, and shiny
	  packages such as wbd, libmtag, picard, pigz, lzip, mono-nat,
	  fuse-mp3fs, bubblemon, py-openid, luajit, dash, ario, mkcue,
	  flactag, unac, postgres-8.4, filezilla, udns, xulrunner, sigil,
	  libev, ssss, ical2rem, ocp, gupnp-igd, farsight2, hugin, 
	  asymptote, libasyncns, milkytracker, pkgsrc-todo, gbemol,
	  re-alpine, devkitd, gcc44, and kde4

+ the "Package of the Month" award has been resurrected, thanks to
  Antti Kantee, and is awarded to pkgsrc/misc/py-anita - anita uses
  qemu to download a NetBSD/i386 distribution and install it, and
  boots the installed system to a "login:" prompt.

The list of platforms supported by pkgsrc is AIX, BSD/OS, Darwin (Mac
OS X), DragonFly BSD, FreeBSD, HP/UX, IRIX, Interix, Linux, NetBSD,
OSF1, OpenBSD, QNX and SunOS (Solaris).  We are aware that support for
some platforms is at a more mature stage than others, and would like
to encourage feedback from users and developers on our more esoteric
platforms.

+ continuing engineering on the "stable" branches of pkgsrc continues
to work well, and our release engineering team has done a marvellous
job in pulling up changes to the stable branch.  Our thanks go to
Geert Hendrickx, Matthias Scheler, Lubomir Sedlacik, Tyler Retzlaff,
and S.P.Zeidler 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 8969 from 8852; the
number of supported platforms is currently 14, with another one on the
horizon.  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
audit-packages at least every day - this will provide notification of
any packages which are vulnerable to exploit.  Audit-packages is part
of the pkg_install tools.

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-2009Q3/pkgsrc-2009Q3.tar.gz
		or
	ftp://ftp.NetBSD.org/pub/pkgsrc/pkgsrc-2009Q3/pkgsrc-2009Q3.tar.bz2

You can also use the "pkgsrc-2009Q3" 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