Table of Contents
As in other big projects, the directory layout of pkgsrc
is quite complex for newbies. This chapter explains where you
find things on the FTP server. The base directory on
ftp.NetBSD.org is /pub/pkgsrc/.
On other servers it may be different, but inside this directory,
everything should look the same, no matter on which server you
are. This directory contains some subdirectories, which are
explained below.
The directory distfiles contains lots
of archive files from all pkgsrc packages, which are mirrored
here. The subdirectories are called after their package names
and are used when the distributed files have names that don't
explicitly contain a version number or are otherwise too generic
(for example release.tar.gz).
This directory contains things that individual pkgsrc developers find worth publishing.
This directory contains binary packages for the various
platforms that are supported by pkgsrc.
Each subdirectory is of the form OPSYS/ARCH/OSVERSION_TAG. The meaning of these variables is:
OPSYS is the name of the
operating system for which the packages have been built. The
name is taken from the output of the uname
command, so it may differ from the one you are used to
hear.
ARCH is the hardware
architecture of the platform for which the packages have been
built. It also includes the ABI (Application
Binary Interface) for platforms that have several of
them.
OSVERSION is the version of
the operating system. For version numbers that change often (for
example NetBSD-current), the often-changing part should be
replaced with an x, for example
4.99.x.
TAG is either
20
for a stable branch, or xxQyhead for packages
built from the HEAD branch. The latter should only be used when
the packages are updated on a regular basis. Otherwise the date
from checking out pkgsrc should be appended, for example
head_20071015.
The rationale for exactly this scheme is that the pkgsrc users looking for binary packages can quickly click through the directories on the server and find the best binary packages for their machines. Since they usually know the operating system and the hardware architecture, OPSYS and ARCH are placed first. After these choices, they can select the best combination of OSVERSION and TAG together, since it is usually the case that packages stay compatible between different version of the operating system.
In each of these directories, there is a
whole binary packages collection for a specific platform. It has a directory called
All which contains all binary packages.
Besides that, there are various category directories that
contain symbolic links to the real binary packages.
Here are the reports from bulk builds, for those who want
to fix packages that didn't build on some of the platforms. The
structure of subdirectories should look like the one in Section C.3, “packages: Binary packages”.
These directories contain the “real” pkgsrc, that is the files that define how to create binary packages from source archives.
The directory pkgsrc contains a
snapshot of the CVS repository, which is updated regularly. The
file pkgsrc.tar.gz contains the same as the
directory, ready to be downloaded as a whole.
In the directories for the quarterly branches, there is an
additional file called
pkgsrc-20,
which contains the state of pkgsrc when it was branched.xxQy.tar.gz