unsigned long geek = random();

pkgsrc doesn’t officially support re-bootstrapping once it’s been installed (ie updating the core packages by doing a fresh bootstrap). There is a way to force one by removing a few core packages first though:
pkg_delete -ff bootstrap-mk-files bmake tnftp pax pkg_install
cd /usr/pkgsrc/bootstrap
./bootstrap


As long as the fresh bootstrap is done using the same parameters as used originally (prefix, database directory, etc), everything should work as before.

I tested this a short while ago on an OS X 10.5 system using a pkgsrc -current tree and it worked perfectly.

Although FreeBSD is a platform supported by pkgsrc, only i386 supported is explicitly mentioned and the most recent bootstrap binaries are for FreeBSD/i386 5.3. Being the adventurous chap I am, I decided to bootstrap from source on my dual CPU Ultra 60 running FreeBSD/sparc64 6.2. In true pkgsrc style, it Just Worked. Since bootstrapping, I’ve build a number of fairly large packages without problem: zsh, ncurses, vim, postfix, perl.

Why pkgsrc and not ports on a FreeBSD system? Well, I have a finely tuned pkgsrc environment that builds packages with my set of defaults (MIT Kerberos support, for example), so I decided to stick with what works well for me.

A few weeks ago I contacted Internet Solutions and they are now kindly hosting a local pkgsrc distfiles mirror. To use it, simply add the following to your /etc/mk.conf:
MASTER_SITE_OVERRIDE=ftp://ftp.is.co.za/NetBSD/packages/distfiles/

If a file isn’t found at the local mirror, the pkgsrc fetch Makefile target will fetch it from another (non-local) mirror.

Over the past few weeks SourceForge.net has been moving projects from cvs.sf.net to projectname.cvs.sf.net. Not wanting to delete my currently checked out copy of pkgsrc-wip and check out again, I needed to update CVS/Root in each checked out directory. Neil gave me this useful snippet to accomplish exactly this:
find . -type f -name "Root" | grep "/CVS/" | xargs sed -i -e 's/cvs.sf.net/pkgsrc-wip.cvs.sf.net/'


It assumes a sed which supports the -i option – NetBSD’s doesn’t, so I used perl -i -p -e instead (I could also have installed textproc/gsed from pkgsrc, but I already had perl installed).

Today I had to rebuild Mozilla Firefox due to the release of 1.5.0.2. Unfortunately, due to my choice of platform (NetBSD/alpha), I have to build my own binary from scratch and can’t just do a delta binary update. The build timings on a 500Mhz EV56 AlphaServer 800:
real 608m54.243s
user 507m15.788s
sys 77m30.249s


Yes, it took 10 hours to build a web browser…

Sometimes I love being proven wrong, and this is one such occasion. As a follow-up to my earlier post, a few people have pointed out to me that Embedded Common Lisp (ECL) works on NetBSD/sparc64. Yay!

There is a package in pkgsrc-wip. It didn’t compile cleanly on my -current system (it includes <frame .h> rather than <machine/frame.h>), but I’ll submit a patch to the maintainer to fix that.

Yesterday I discovered a neat piece of software to complement my Fluxbox desktop – fluxter. It’s a pager that’s faster than bbpager, can be embedded in the slit and tracks the style of the current theme.

I’ve commited a package to pkgsrc-wip.

One of the disadvantages of using a slightly less mainstream CPU architecture: there’s no Lisp interpreter for NetBSD/sparc64 available in pkgsrc. Not even DrScheme compiles.