freebsd announce - Oct 2013 - Official FreeBSD Binary Packages now available for pkgng

We are pleased to announce that official binary packages are now
available for pkg, the next generation package management tool for FreeBSD.

Pkg allows you to either use ports with portmaster/portupgrade or to
have binary remote packages without ports.

We have binary packages available for i386 and amd64 on
8.3,8.4,9.1,9.2,10.0 and 11 (head).

Pkg will be the default starting in FreeBSD 10.

The pkg_install suite of tools pkg_create(1), pkg_add(1), and
pkg_info(1) (which ports also use), are deprecated and will be
discontinued in roughly 6 months. A communication regarding the
deprecation of the pkg_install suite of tools will be sent separately in
the future.

If you are currently not using pkg and wish to, run the following as
root. Be sure not to add WITH_PKGNG=yes to your make.conf until after
pkg is installed.

  # cd /usr/ports/ports-mgmt/pkg && make install clean
  # echo WITH_PKGNG=yes >> /etc/make.conf
  # pkg2ng

You can now either continue to use ports with portmaster/portupgrade, as
before or switch to using binary packages only.


To use binary packages:

1. Ensure your pkg(8) is up-to-date. 'pkg -v' should say at least
   1.1.4_8. If it does not, first upgrade from ports.
2. Remove any repository-specific configuration from
   /usr/local/etc/pkg.conf, such as PACKAGESITE, MIRROR_TYPE, PUBKEY.
   If this leaves your pkg.conf empty, just remove it.
3. mkdir -p /usr/local/etc/pkg/repos
4. Create the file /usr/local/etc/pkg/repos/FreeBSD.conf with:
FreeBSD: {
  url: "http://pkg.FreeBSD.org/${ABI}/latest",
  mirror_type: "srv",
  enabled: "yes"
}

* Note that pkg.FreeBSD.org does not have a browsable web page on it and
does not have a DNS A record. This is intended as it is an SRV host.
pkg(8) knows how to properly use it. You can use 'pkg search' to browse
the available packages in the repository.

Mirrors you may use instead of the global pkg.FreeBSD.org:

    pkg.eu.FreeBSD.org
    pkg.us-east.FreeBSD.org
    pkg.us-west.FreeBSD.org

Your system is now ready to use packages!

Refer to the handbook section on pkgng for usage at
http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/pkgng-intro.html.
Also see 'man pkg' for examples or 'pkg help'.


Packages are built weekly from a snapshot of the Ports Collection every
Wednesday morning 01:00 UTC. They typically will be available in the
repository after a few days.

Pkg 1.2 will be released in the coming month which will bring many
improvements including officially signed packages. FreeBSD 10's pkg
bootstrap now also supports signed pkg(8) installation.


Regards,
Bryan Drewery
on behalf of portmgr@