The developers of NetBSD recently announced the release of the packet repository pkgsrc-2024q4, marking the 85th release of the project. PKGSRC, which supports 23 platforms including AIX, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, and Linux, was created in 1997 based on FreeBSD ports and is currently the default tool for managing applications in NetBSD and Minix. Additionally, PKGSRC is used by SOLARIS/ILLUMOS and MacOS as an additional source of packages.
The latest repository offers more than 20 thousand packages, with 110 new packages, 33 removed packages, and 1580 updated packages. This includes updates for 24 packages associated with the GO language, 3 with OCAML, 66 with perl, 5 with PHP, 626 with Python, 282 with Ruby, and 44 with Tex.
Notable additions to the repository include Mingw-W64 14.2.0 packages, Opensmtpd Tables, Python 3.13, Ruby On Rails 7.2.2.1, and Thunderbird 115. Older branches such as Firefox 102, PostgreSQL 12, Python 3.8, and Thunderbird 102 have been removed.
Furthermore, the release introduces MKTool tools to the assembly infrastructure, offering alternative implementations of various MK scripts that demonstrate significantly improved performance, with acceleration ranging from 5 to 500 times.