Pkgsrc 2012Q4 Released, Celebrates 15 Years

NetBSD developers have announced the release of pkgsrc-2012Q4, the latest quarterly release of the package management system used by many BSD operating systems and other Unix-like platforms. This latest release also marks fifteen years that this open-source "package source" program has been around.

The detailed release announcement for pkgsrc-2012Q4 hit the netbsd-announce list. "The pkgsrc team is proud to announce that pkgsrc-2012Q4 is available. This release marks the 15th birthday of pkgsrc (the first entries were added in October 1997), and this release includes many new packages and updates."

For those unfamiliar with pkgsrc that's used by NetBSD and others, "pkgsrc is a framework allowing third-party software to be built, installed, and managed in a consistent, logical and easy manner. The resulting binary packages can be manipulated using binary package managers like pkgin and nih. The framework is portable across operating systems, making it easy to support diverse systems from Windows to BSD, and including Linux and Mac OS X - see below for a complete list of platforms."

Aside from NetBSD, pkgsrc can also be used on Solaris, various Linux distributions, Mac OS X, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, DragonFlyBSD, Haiku, Illumos, and many others.

The pkgsrc for NetBSD-Current/amd64 now has 11,942 total packages. There were 178 packages added for the last quarter of 2012 while 30 packages were removed and 1,259 packages received updates.

One of the interesting statistics delivered with the pkgsrc-2012Q4 announcement is that there's more packages building with the LLVM/Clang compiler than GCC. A total of 11,336 packages were generated when targeting x86_64 with the Clang compiler on NetBSD while only 11,229 packages could be built under GCC.