[ANNOUNCEMENT] The pkgsrc-2007Q3 Branch

[Alistair Crooks]

The pkgsrc-2007Q3 Branch
========================

The pkgsrc developers are very proud to announce the new pkgsrc-2007Q3
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.

At the same time, the pkgsrc-2007Q2 branch has been deprecated, and
continuing engineering starts on the pkgsrc-2007Q3 branch.

This branch celebrates the tenth anniversary of pkgsrc, and we would
like to take this opportunity to thank all of the people who have made
pkgsrc the most portable packaging system in the world - to all of the
users, developers and supporters a very large "Thank you" from all of
us.

Some highlights of the new pkgsrc-2007Q3 branch are:

+ 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-2007Q3 branch:

	+ apache-2.2.6
	+ firefox-2.0.0.7
	+ gnome-2.18.1
	+ kde-3.5.7
	+ mysql-5.0.45
	+ openoffice-2.3.0
	+ opera-9.23
	+ postgresql-8.2.5
	+ ruby-1.8.6.111
	+ samba-3.0.24
	+ seamonkey-1.1.4
	+ thunderbird-2.0.0.6
	+ wireshark-0.99.6
	+ zope-3.3.1

+ other changes include
	+ audit-packages has been rewritten in C to make it perform
	  better; it has also been merged with pkg_install-20070714
	  and later versions. pkgsrc now comes with package
	  auditing built in
	+ pkg_install has been modified by Joerg Sonnenberger to
	  bring in some of the pkg_install work he did for the
	  Google Summer of Code last year
	+ the addition of a framework for managing binary-only
	  packages that require and support binary emulation, by
	  Johnny Lam
	+ we have continued to develop our "filesystems" category
	+ the addition of some pertinent bright, shiny packages such
	  as vym, fuse-afpfs-ng, wpi-firmware2, quilt, freealut,
	  flightgear, simgear, espeak, glade3, orca, inspircd, 
	  pidgin, finch, nfdump, claws-mail, xdm, policyd, vbetool,
	  fuse-wikipediafs, courier, atf, bugzilla3, nipper, youtube-dl,
	  pound, fpdns, adplug, pcc, and qhull 

To the list of platforms supported by pkgsrc - AIX, BSD/OS, Darwin
(Mac OS X), DragonFly BSD, FreeBSD, HP/UX, IRIX, Interix, Linux,
NetBSD, OSF1, OpenBSD, and SunOS (Solaris) - we are proud to welcome
QNX, thanks to Sean Boudreaux.

+ continuing engineering on the "stable" branches of pkgsrc continues,
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 7330; the number of
supported platforms has risen to 14.  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.  As mentioned earlier,
this is part of the new pkg_install tools, and is now much quicker. 
We shall be removing the old package in the next pkgsrc release.
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-2007Q3/pkgsrc-2007Q3.tar.gz
		or
	ftp://ftp.NetBSD.org/pub/pkgsrc/pkgsrc-2007Q3/pkgsrc-2007Q3.tar.bz2

You can also use the "pkgsrc-2007Q3" 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