freebsd stable - Mar 2014 - [HEADSUP] pkg 1.3.0 alpha1: Breath of fresh air from Kirov

Hello,

I'm really pleased to announce that the release process for the new major
version of pkg(8) has started with this first alpha1 release.

The main feature for this release is the complete rework of the solver.
pkg(8) now features a real SAT solver and uses it for every operations requested
by the user that may add, upgrade or remove packages.

This work is is the result of the very succesfull Google Summer of Code 2013, by
Vsevolod Stakhov (vsevolod@ also known as cebka). This is a major improvement
for the project, and the fundation for lots of new features in the future.

I would like to thanks Vsevolod for all the new ideas and hard work he has done
(not limited to the new solver.)

Back to the release now. pkg 1.3.0 comes with the following new features:
- New solver that can support external solvers using the CUDF format and the
  internal SAT solver
- pkg-ssh(8) is now sandboxed using capsicum if available
- pkg-ssh(8) now uses poll(2)
- Remove StringList usage to improve portability
- Rework the build system to using autotools to help portability
- Now fetching is done to a temporary location and cleaned up if it fails
- Remove support for PACKAGESITE
- pkg-audit(8): remove support for portaudit compact database (only VulnXML will
  be used)
- Improved UI experience based on jmmv write up
  (http://julipedia.meroh.net/search/label/cli-design)
- Hide the average speed from the progress bar (confusing for users)
- Reworking the database locking mechanism into a finer grain and more clever
  system
- Dynamic conflict handling if a conflict on files is detected at the sanity
  check level, try to solve the problem again with the new conflict information
- Fix %t (timestamp) modifier in pkg_printf(3)
- pkg-info(8): full output now has a new field "date installed"
- New pkg -o A=B to overwrite configuration from command line without the need
  of defining environment variables
- pkg-install(8): can handle local files
- pkg-add(8) is now an alias on pkg-install
- Simplify API by using more and more libucl objects (hidden behind an opaque
  'pkg_object')

Thanks to everyone that has contributed code for this release:
Alberto Villa, Alexandre Perrin, Baptiste Daroussin, Brad Davis, Bryan Drewery,
Jamie Landeg Jones, John Marino, Matthew Seaman, Maximilian Gaß, Michael
Gehring, Michael Gmelin, Rodrigo Osorio, Rui Paulo, Sean Channel, Stanislav E.
Putrya, Vsevolod Stakhov, Xin Li, coctic

Thanks also to all people reporting bugs, sharing ideas, testing and using
pkg(8).

regards,
Bapt