PKGSRC will be officially supported as of the next release

[Matthew Dillon]

    I've been watching PKGSRC developments with some eagerness, in particular
    the increasing numbers of DragonFly developers willing to put significant
    time into making PKGSRC work for DragonFly, not to mention the large
    number of people (judging from the related mailing lists) working on it
    for other platforms.  Despite the problems iterated over many a bikeshed
    in the last few months I feel that PKGSRC is the best bandwagon for us
    to jump onto and support.  It is clearly going to be more dragonfly-
    friendly than FreeBSD ports as time moves on.  Our dfports was never 
    meant for the long haul and it is clearly no longer capable of crossing
    the gap, let alone achieve the high level of maintainance that is 
    necessary to things up to date.  This is proven out by the number
    of commits to dfports recently (just 2 files in the last 60 days, and
    18 in the last 90).  dfports has clearly outlived its usefulness.

    I have considered going it alone many times, ever since DragonFly first
    started, but it is clear to me now that it is just not possible.  We
    would never be able to keep things up-to-date over the long haul.   Even
    though PKGSRC isn't perfect, it seems to me that it is organized well
    enough that we can overcome any difficulties.

    Having DragonFly support the PKGSRC environment will also be beneficial
    to PKGSRC as it will add another operating system and ensure even better
    portability.  NetBSD's support of PKGSRC will greatly reduce problems
    we would otherwise face when we start working on 64 bit support.

    Our next major release will be in December.  I think a 6-month release
    cycle is working out very well for the DragonFly team.  With sub-versions
    filling-in the gaps and Preview providing fairly stable jumps for people
    more interested in the bleeding-edge, the 6-month cycle we have been
    following really gives us the time we need to add, solidify, and test
    new features without feeling rushed.

    In the next month or two I intend to beef up my backup facilities
    and put together a dedicated MP box for PKGSRC building.  Jeremy will
    continue using leaf for package building (he now has a jailed root to
    play with) until then.

					-Matt
					Matthew Dillon 
					<dillon at xxxxxxxxxxxxx>