The pkgsrc-2005Q1 Branch
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The pkgsrc developers are very proud to announce the new pkgsrc-2005Q1
branch, which has support for more packages than previous branches.=20
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-2004Q4 branch has been deprecated, and
continuing engineering starts on the pkgsrc-2005Q1 branch.

Some highlights of the new pkgsrc-2005Q1 branch are:

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

	o openoffice-1.1.4
	o xfce-4.2.1.1
	o mysql-4.1.10a
	o ruby-1.8.2
	o postgres-8.0.1
	o apache-2.0.53
	o xentools-2.0.3
	o openldap-2.2.20
	o perl-5.8.6
	o X.org-6.8.1
	o gnome-2.8.3

+ support for multiple digests to check the integrity of the
distribution files as found on the Internet, in light of the
recently-found problems with the SHA-1 algorithm.  See

	http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2005/02/sha1_broken.html

for more details.

+ the alternatives framework was added to the infrastructure, thereby
allowing easy selection of different alternatives for common program
names.

+ for ease of support on operating systems which still have moderate
restrictions on the length of a filename, we have made some
modifications to the pkg_install tools.

The full list of platforms supported by pkgsrc is:  AIX, BSD/OS,
Darwin (MacOS X), DragonFly, FreeBSD, IRIX, Interix, Linux, NetBSD,
OSF1, OpenBSD, SunOS (Solaris), and UnixWare. We hope to add support
for more over the next quarter.

+ improved infrastructure for non-NetBSD platforms, including 64-bit
variants of some operating systems, whilst continuing to keep NetBSD
as the main target platform

+ removed some older and vulnerable packages, such as kde2 and related
packages, and the suse-6.4 Linux packages.  pkgsrc continues to support
newer versions of these packages.

+ 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 (see the pkgsrc-bulk
mailing list) 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

+ the number of packages has been increased to 5421; the number of
supported platforms continues to be 13.  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 source tar files for the new branch can be found at:

	ftp://ftp.NetBSD.org/pub/pkgsrc/2005Q1/pkgsrc-2005Q1.tar.gz
		or
	ftp://ftp.NetBSD.org/pub/pkgsrc/2005Q1/pkgsrc-2005Q1.tar.bz2

You can also use the "pkgsrc-2005Q1" 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