On 3 of October 64rd quarterly release of pkgsrc was announced. pkgsrc-2019Q3 had 301 packages added and 114 packages removed, 1280 packages were updated (1682 package updates in total). Besides notable additions mentioned in the release announcement, it was the first release with contribution from myself! Due to time constraints I don’t believe that I will become regular contributor but I plan to work on few selected packages in the future too.

Recently I am trying to build my own desktop environment on NetBSD which is based on current branch and using current pkgsrc for packages. I successfully built up to date MATE 1.22.1 desktop environment but got stuck on pretty outaded CodeLite IDE (9.1.0 in pkgsrc compared to 13.0.0 being the latest at the time of writing). The first error I hit by was:

/usr/pkgsrc/editors/codelite/work/codelite-9.1/LiteEditor/clangpch_cache.h:35:10: fatal error: clang-c/Index.h: No such file or directory

Since I was quite sure that I should have it, I quickly looked around and I found that header exists in /usr/pkg/include/clang-c/Index.h. So quick workaround was quite obvious by setting CFLAGS environment variable to point to pkg include folder. Since I checked that this variable didn’t have any value, I just simply did:

export CFLAGS=/usr/pkg/include

It helped me to finish the build successfully but linking failed with “ld: cannot find -lclang” error… So yet another environment variable was needed:

export LIBRARY_PATH=/usr/pkg/lib

After that linking went successfully but it wasn’t the end of the story yet. Package PLIST file contained 5 files which were not available after the build. Apparently spell checker was not part of the build for some reason and lib/codelite/SpellCheck.so and all files in share/codelite/dics/ folder (including folder itself) were missing. Because of this pkg_create was failing to assemble the installation package. You would see messages like “pkg_create: can’t stat <filename>”. I just decided remove those files from PLIST file:

fossil diff --unified PLIST

Unfortunately there is one caveat that after changing this file I needed to make a clean build again (make clean before make install). Fortunately, it doesn’t take long to rebuild CodeLite on modern CPU, especially if all cores are utilized. Finally, after all the struggles CodeLite IDE started successfully (even if it’s a relatively old version).

Update: Actually I managed to build the latest CodeLite (13.0.1) too straight from github source code. The most applied patches were the same as pkgsrc package has (actually seems even less is needed now). Manually I needed to add /usr/pkg/libexec/wx-3.0 to PATH since build script need wx-config and I also needed to change libssh.so path to from /usr/lib/libssh.so to /usr/pkg/lib/libssh.so (libssh-0.87) in CMakeFiles/<module>.dir/link.txt files which were linking against it. Probably updating pkgsrc package should not be difficult too considering my relatively easy success , so I guess package is not actively maintained anymore. Will see if I can prepare a patch.

On 8 of July 63rd quarterly release of pkgsrc was announced . pkgsrc-2019Q2 had 84 packages added, 61 packages removed, and 1,881 packages updated. Python 3.7 is now the default python, changing from 2.7.

NetBSD 7.0.1, first security/bug fix version for 7.0 release branch was released on 28 of May, 2016. As always it is strongly recommended to update to the latest version if you still use earlier releases. Release notes can be found here. Choose download mirrors from here.

On the other news pkgrsrc  announced pkgsrc-2016Q1, their 50th  release on 9 of May, 2016. In honor to this unusual event several interviews can be found with Joerg Sonnenberger, Sevan Janiyan and Thomas Klausner.