pkgsrc for Illumos

The Illumos project is "a community maintained derivative of the OpenSolaris ON source, including open source replacements for closed bits, and additional changes" (from http://www.illumos.org/). A couple of month ago, the Illumos community launched "The Illumos pkgsrc project", thus communicating for the first time on pkgsrc being officially supported by a SunOS derivative.

First thing done was a bootstrap wrapper written by Mads Worsøe Duun, ipp. This wrapper permits to easily prepare a pkgsrc environment on an OpenIndiana/Illumos/SunOS 5.11 platforms.

At some point i got involved into the project initiated by Mads, and we quickly got a build zone from OpenIndiana in order to bring some reality to the project. After a month of work, we finally got about 6000 packages built for this platform, and eventually were given a hosting zone for those.

Also, Mads just released a pkgadd(1) package which includes a pre-configured pkgin binary so those packages are immediately available for use. As of today, it is possible to install more than 6000 pkgsrc binary packages on a SunOS 5.11 based platform, as easily as in NetBSD, DragonFly BSD or MINIX.

Many thanks to everyone who provided patches and workarounds in order to make this possible. Special thanks to the OpenIndiana crowd for providing us the build and hosting zones.

• The Illumos pkgsrc project
• pkgsrc-2011Q1 bulk build report
• pkgsrc-2011Q1 binary packages repository
• pkgadd(1) startup package and ipp downloads
• Work-in-progress Wiki