pkgsrc: The NetBSD Packages Collection
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The NetBSD Packages Collection (pkgsrc) is a framework for building third-party software on NetBSD and other UNIX-like systems, currently containing over 13000 packages. It is used to enable freely available software to be configured and built easily on supported platforms. |
The pkgsrc downloads
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pkgsrc consists of both a Source distribution and a Binary distribution for these operating systems. After retrieving the required source or binaries, you can be up and running with pkgsrc in just minutes!
Table 1. Platforms supported by pkgsrc
| Platform | Date Support Added |
|---|---|
| NetBSD | Aug 1997 |
| Solaris | Mar 1999 |
| Linux | Jun 1999 |
| Darwin (Mac OS X) | Oct 2001 |
| FreeBSD | Nov 2002 |
| OpenBSD | Nov 2002 |
| IRIX | Dec 2002 |
| BSD/OS | Dec 2003 |
| AIX | Dec 2003 |
| Interix (Microsoft Windows Services for Unix) | Mar 2004 |
| DragonFlyBSD | Oct 2004 |
| OSF/1 | Nov 2004 |
| HP-UX | Apr 2007 |
| QNX | Oct 2007 |
| Haiku | Sep 2010 |
| MirBSD | Jan 2011 |
The binary packages that are produced by pkgsrc can be used without having to compile everything from source. NetBSD already contains the necessary tools for managing binary packages, on other platforms you need to bootstrap pkgsrc to get the package management tools installed. A browsable list of packages, including links to available binary packages, is here.
Binary packages are available on ftp.NetBSD.org and its
mirrors in
the directory /pub/pkgsrc/packages/ (see the pkgsrc guide for more
details). If the tools for managing binary packages do not exist on a
platform or are too old, they are provided along the binary packages in
an archive called bootstrap.tar.gz, which must be
extracted in the / directory. Then you can run
/usr/pkg/sbin/pkg_add to install binary packages.
See the pkgsrc
guide for detailed instructions.
You can download the pkgsrc tarball or check out the latest sources using AnonCVS:
#cvs checkout pkgsrc
(for using the AnonCVS service, see the Fetching by CVS section in the NetBSD Guide).
After downloading and/or extracting the sources, installing the bootstrap kit should be as simple as:
#cd pkgsrc/bootstrap#./bootstrap
This will use the defaults of /usr/pkg for the
prefix and /var/db/pkg for
the package database directory. However, these can also be set using
command-line parameters (use ./bootstrap --help
to see the available options).
Note that when using pkgsrc on a non-NetBSD system, use the bmake command instead of “make” to run NetBSD make, which is required for correct pkgsrc operation. Simply substitute “bmake” for “make” in pkgsrc documentation.