How do I use pkgsrc?

Question

I'm running NetBSD in a virtual machine. Documentation and explanations on how to use pkgsrc are scarce. Let's say I want to install vim for NetBSD. What would I type? Do I need a URL? Do I need a specific version? Do I need to set up a directory for building the source of vim?

Sorry, dude, but as a former long-term user of NetBSD (this being >10 years ago), I think claiming `pkgsrc` was »scarcely« documented is just utterly wrong. https://www.netbsd.org/docs/pkgsrc/ — Andreas Wiese, May 09 '16 at 21:33

score 4 · Answer 1 · answered May 11 '16 at 16:19

4

As Andreas said, pkgsrc is very well documented. Follow the pkgsrc guide and you should be in business in no time

answered May 11 '16 at 16:19

Master Shuffler

79
2

score 2 · Answer 2 · edited Aug 24 '16 at 10:25

Suppose you've unpacked the pkgsrc tree into /home/melab/pkgsrc. Then you can build gvim as follows:

cd /home/melab/pkgsrc/editors/gvim
make package install clean

Note that make might be /usr/pkg/bin/bmake if you bootstrapped pkgsrc yourself with default options, though NetBSD /usr/bin/make is really bmake. This very simple explanation glosses over all the fine tuning that's possible by editing the pkgsrc settings file (/etc/mk.conf or perhaps /usr/pkg/etc/mk.conf) - for that you would need to check the extensive documentation.

How do I use pkgsrc?

2 Answers2