The pkgsrc-2006Q1 Branch

========================
The pkgsrc developers are very proud to announce the new pkgsrc-2006Q1

branch, which has support for 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, and also for enhanced security.
At the same time, the pkgsrc-2005Q4 branch has been deprecated, and

continuing engineering starts on the pkgsrc-2006Q1 branch.
Some highlights of the new pkgsrc-2006Q1 branch are:
+ many, many packages have been updated to newer versions, to take

advantage of fixes and improved functionality.  This includes
	+ firefox-1.5.0.1

	+ gnome-2.12.2

	+ kde-3.5.1

	+ opera-8.52

	+ perl-5.8.7

	+ postgresql 8.1.3

	+ thunderbird-1.5

	+ X.org 6.9

	+ the addition of some pertinent bright, shiny packages such

	  as apache-tomcat-5.5.14, cdrtools, nagios, qt4, strace,

	  sunbird, and suse 10 packages better to support Linux

	  emulation.

	+ a considerable number of fixes for much better DragonFly BSD

	  operation, which will also benefit a lot of pkgsrc platforms,

	  with thanks to Joerg Sonnenberger
The full list of platforms supported by pkgsrc is:  AIX, BSD/OS,

Darwin (Mac OS X), DragonFly BSD, FreeBSD, IRIX, Interix, Linux, NetBSD,

OSF1, OpenBSD, SunOS (Solaris), and UnixWare.  We would like to add

support for more - please get in touch if you, too, are interested.
+ following DragonFly BSD's adoption of pkgsrc as their packaging

system, Joerg Sonnenberger has made a lot of changes, which include a

number of modifications for packages which use POSIX threading

libraries, and also enhanced support for gcc 3.4 and above
+ a number of changes in pkgsrc's infrastructure have been introduced,

including improvements in the PLIST handling, the ongoing work to

validate PLISTs automatically, especially during bulk builds, and the

improvements in the pkginstall framework, most noticably

font-handling.
+ 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 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 5943; 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.
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/2006Q1/pkgsrc-2006Q1.tar.gz

		or

	ftp://ftp.NetBSD.org/pub/pkgsrc/2006Q1/pkgsrc-2006Q1.tar.bz2
You can also use the "pkgsrc-2006Q1" 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