pkgsrc 50th release interviews - Thomas Klausner

The pkgsrc team has prepared the 50th release of their package management system, with the 2016Q1 version. It's infrequent event, as the 100th release will be held after 50 quarters.

The NetBSD team has prepared series of interviews with the authors. The 3rd one is with Thomas Klausner, a developer well known for his maintainership of the pkgsrc-wip project.

First of all, congratulations on the 50th release of pkgsrc! How do you feel about this anniversary?

I'm very glad that pkgsrc that so many people find pkgsrc useful and like working on it, both on pkgsrc itself and pkgsrc-wip.

What are the main benefits of the pkgsrc system?

Get packages installed on your system, and keep them up-to-date, and don't worry about the underlying operating system.

Where and how do you use pkgsrc?

I use pkgsrc on my desktop machine at home and on various servers.

What are the pkgsrc projects you are currently working on?

Currently I have no single big project. I regularly try to keep a couple of hundred packages up-to-date, and to feed back patches upstream, so more software builds out-of-the-box. This also has the advantages of making updates easier, and spreading awareness of pkgsrc and NetBSD. Recently I've been more focusing on pushing upstream the pkgsrc patches for firefox.

If you analyze the current state of pkgsrc, which improvements and changes do you wish for the future?

A recent issue is that we need to add a framework for PaX security features; luckily, this is already implemented and just needs merging. Longer term I think our binary package tools could use some love and fresh code.

Do you have any practical tips to share with the pkgsrc users?

If you build your packages yourself, then use pkgtools/mksandbox to create sandboxes and run bulk builds inside them using pkgtools/pbulk. It makes life in general and updates in particular so much easier!

What's the best way to start contributing to pkgsrc and what needs to be done?

The easiest way is to start using pkgsrc on your own machines. Once you feel comfortable with that you'll probably notice that you want to update a package, or add a new one. If you reach that point, visit http://pkgsrc.org/wip/ to get commit access to the pkgsrc wip repository.

If you need help, contact the pkgsrc-users mailing list or visit us in #pkgsrc on freenode!

Do you plan to participate in the upcoming pkgsrcCon 2016 in Kraków (1-3 July)?

Definitely! I'm looking forward to meeting other pkgsrc developers again or for the first time, and to many interesting talks.

Cheers,
Thomas