I have been a pkgsrc developer for several years. For what it’s worth, I think pkgsrc is wonderful: a large selection of third-party software, packaged so that it is easy to install with a single command – either building everything from source, or relying on binary packages. pkgsrc supports dozens of OSes – not just NetBSD but also other BSDs, macOS, Linux, Illumos and more.

On the other hand, unfortunately, pkgsrc and NetBSD in general are suffering from what I would call a loss of mindshare. When I joined the NetBSD Foundation as a developer, I had the impression that NetBSD had more users and community than OpenBSD or, say, Dragonfly. In recent years however, it seems to me that people have more or less forgotten about NetBSD and pkgsrc.

Here is where you may come in

Here is a simple idea that occurred to me a while ago and that I finally am getting around to writing up, now that I am sitting in the train to FOSDEM 2023:

These days, a lot of upstream software has a manual with a section on installation that does not give instructions for actually building it. (It seems like building from source is so 1995, or something.) Instead, it goes roughly like this:

If you are using a Mac or a Linux/x86_64 machine, see our own binary packages here. Or use distro packages:

For Debian, run apt-get install somepackage.

For Fedora Linux, run some yum command.

etc. etc.

There is typically a long list of install commands for a bunch of Linux distributions and OSes. pkgsrc is almost never mentioned.

So if you are looking for a simple way of helping out pkgsrc and NetBSD, look for the README of your favorite Open Source tools and add a section for installing from pkgsrc. Typically, for a package from pkgsrc itself, the simplest is to add instructions for using pkgin:

$ pkgin install somepackage

For packages in pkgsrc-wip, you could first ask on the mailing list for an import so that there may be binary packages in the future :) Then, give the typical instructions for installing from source:

$ cd /usr/pkgsrc/wip/somepackage
$ make package-install

I have created a few pull requests for such changes in the past, but I think we need a lot more of that!