Hello all, A few disclaimers up front:
- This is no way intended to be anything negative against NetBSD devs. I 100% appreciate all the hard work in the project. Just trying to understand and “do the right thing” in terms of my systems. - I come from the linux world (don’t shoot !) - so I’m more used to a smaller breadth in this regard (obviously NetBSD supports oodles of platforms so I get this…) I’ve been playing with NetBSD 9.3 on one of my old sparcstations (32 bit). As you can imagine - the speed of the system makes compiling from pkgsrc a bit onerous. So because of this I try to use pre-built packages when possible. I also have some amd64 VMs that I use to test out things I don’t want to clutter the sparcs with. Useful to compare behavior as well between the arch’s. So some of my questions / confusion: - Take a look at http://ftp.netbsd.org/pub/pkgsrc/pkgsrc-2022Q4/ In that dir there are bundles that have the snapshot name in them, and others that don’t. Very hard to tell what is what. I would assume the ones with the snapshot in the name are the ones of that snapshot based on the file dates ? What are the others with dates ahead of the snapshot date ? - Compare these two dirs: http://ftp.netbsd.org/pub/pkgsrc/packages/NetBSD/amd64/ http://ftp.netbsd.org/pub/pkgsrc/packages/NetBSD/sparc/ amd64 has a lot more subdirs, versions etc. Not consistent. Is this because of the “tier” status of the arch’s ? - So as time moves on - I would guess older packages* dir’s get removed. Are there any timelines/guidelines on when this happens ? My thinking is along the lines of say Ubuntu where unless it’s LTS (5 years) - the intermediate versions repos go dark. So running a non-LTS system - you will find you can’t (easily) install packages after such and such a time… Hopefully my questions make sense. Thanks.
