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Pkgviews is tightly integrated with buildlink. You can find a pkgviews User's guide in pkgsrc/mk/buildlink3/PKGVIEWS_UG.

The pkgsrc/pkgtools directory pkgtools contains a number of useful utilities for both users and developers of pkgsrc. This section attempts only to make the reader aware of the utilities and when they might be useful, and not to duplicate the documentation that comes with each package.

Utilities used by pkgsrc (automatically installed when needed):

OS tool augmentation (automatically installed when needed):

Utilities used by pkgsrc (not automatically installed):

Utilities for keeping track of installed packages, being up to date, etc:

Utilities for people maintaining or creating individual packages:

Utilities for people maintaining pkgsrc (or: more obscure pkg utilities)

If you want to use pkgsrc as non-root user, you can set some variables to make pkgsrc work under these conditions. At the very least, you need to set UNPRIVILEGED to “yes”; this will turn on unprivileged mode and set multiple related variables to allow installation of packages as non-root.

In case the defaults are not enough, you may want to tune some other variables used. For example, if the automatic user/group detection leads to incorrect values (or not the ones you would like to use), you can change them by setting UNPRIVILEGED_USER and UNPRIVILEGED_GROUP respectively.

As regards bootstrapping, please note that the bootstrap script will ease non-root configuration when given the “--ignore-user-check” flag, as it will choose and use multiple default directories under ~/pkg as the installation targets. These directories can be overriden by the “--prefix” flag provided by the script, as well as some others that allow finer tuning of the tree layout.

By default, resuming transfers in pkgsrc is disabled, but you can enable this feature by adding the option PKG_RESUME_TRANSFERS=YES into /etc/mk.conf. If, during a fetch step, an incomplete distfile is found, pkgsrc will try to resume it.

You can also use a different program than the default ftp(1) by changing the FETCH_CMD variable. Don't forget to set FETCH_RESUME_ARGS and FETCH_OUTPUT_ARGS if you are not using default values.

For example, if you want to use wget to resume downloads, you'll have to use something like:

    FETCH_CMD=             wget
    FETCH_BEFORE_ARGS=     --passive-ftp
    FETCH_RESUME_ARGS=     -c
    FETCH_OUTPUT_ARGS=     -O

If you want to use XFree86 from pkgsrc instead of your system's own X11 (/usr/X11R6, /usr/openwin, ...), you will have to add the following line into /etc/mk.conf:

    X11_TYPE=XFree86

If you want to use X.org from pkgsrc instead of your system's own X11 (/usr/X11R6, /usr/openwin, ...) you will have to add the following line into /etc/mk.conf:

    X11_TYPE=xorg

If you are sitting behind a firewall which does not allow direct connections to Internet hosts (i.e. non-NAT), you may specify the relevant proxy hosts. This is done using an environment variable in the form of a URL, e.g. in Amdahl, the machine “orpheus.amdahl.com” is one of the firewalls, and it uses port 80 as the proxy port number. So the proxy environment variables are:

    ftp_proxy=ftp://orpheus.amdahl.com:80/
    http_proxy=http://orpheus.amdahl.com:80/

This depends on which utility is used to retrieve distfiles. From bsd.pkg.mk, FETCH_CMD is assigned the first available command from the following list:

On a default NetBSD installation, this will be /usr/bin/ftp, which automatically tries passive connections first, and falls back to active connections if the server refuses to do passive. For the other tools, add the following to your /etc/mk.conf file: PASSIVE_FETCH=1.

Having that option present will prevent /usr/bin/ftp from falling back to active transfers.

You would like to download all the distfiles in a single batch from work or university, where you can't run a make fetch. There is an archive of distfiles on ftp.NetBSD.org, but downloading the entire directory may not be appropriate.

The answer here is to do a make fetch-list in /usr/pkgsrc or one of its subdirectories, carry the resulting list to your machine at work/school and use it there. If you don't have a NetBSD-compatible ftp(1) (like lukemftp) at work, don't forget to set FETCH_CMD to something that fetches a URL:

At home:

% cd /usr/pkgsrc
% make fetch-list FETCH_CMD=wget DISTDIR=/tmp/distfiles >/tmp/fetch.sh
% scp /tmp/fetch.sh work:/tmp

At work:

% sh /tmp/fetch.sh

then tar up /tmp/distfiles and take it home.

If you have a machine running NetBSD, and you want to get all distfiles (even ones that aren't for your machine architecture), you can do so by using the above-mentioned make fetch-list approach, or fetch the distfiles directly by running:

% make mirror-distfiles

If you even decide to ignore NO_{SRC,BIN}_ON_{FTP,CDROM}, then you can get everything by running:

% make fetch NO_SKIP=yes

When compiling the pkgtools/pkg_install package, you get the error from make that it doesn't know how to make /usr/share/tmac/tmac.andoc? This indicates that you don't have installed the “text” set (nroff, ...) from the NetBSD base distribution on your machine. It is recommended to do that to format man pages.

In the case of the pkgtools/pkg_install package, you can get away with setting NOMAN=YES either in the environment or in /etc/mk.conf.

You didn't install the compiler set, comp.tgz, when you installed your NetBSD machine. Please get and install it, by extracting it in /:

# cd /
# tar --unlink -zxvpf .../comp.tgz

comp.tgz is part of every NetBSD release. Get the one that corresponds to your release (determine via uname -r).

When installing packages as non-root user and using the just-in-time su(1) feature of pkgsrc, it can become annoying to type in the root password for each required package installed. To avoid this, the sudo package can be used, which does password caching over a limited time. To use it, install sudo (either as binary package or from security/sudo) and then put the following into your /etc/mk.conf:

    .if exists(${LOCALBASE}/bin/sudo)
    SU_CMD=        ${LOCALBASE}/bin/sudo /bin/sh -c
    .endif

As the system administrator, you can choose where configuration files are installed. The default settings make all these files go into ${PREFIX}/etc or some of its subdirectories; this may be suboptimal depending on your expectations (e.g., a read-only, NFS-exported PREFIX with a need of per-machine configuration of the provided packages).

In order to change the defaults, you can modify the PKG_SYSCONFBASE variable (in /etc/mk.conf) to point to your preferred configuration directory; some common examples include /etc or /etc/pkg.

Furthermore, you can change this value on a per-package basis by setting the PKG_SYSCONFDIR.${PKG_SYSCONFVAR} variable. PKG_SYSCONFVAR's value usually matches the name of the package you would like to modify, that is, the contents of PKGBASE.

Note that after changing these settings, you must rebuild and reinstall any affected packages.

Please be aware that there can often be bugs in third-party software, and some of these bugs can leave a machine vulnerable to exploitation by attackers. In an effort to lessen the exposure, the NetBSD packages team maintains a database of known-exploits to packages which have at one time been included in pkgsrc. The database can be downloaded automatically, and a security audit of all packages installed on a system can take place. To do this, install the security/audit-packages package. It has two components:

Use of the security/audit-packages package is strongly recommended! After “audit-packages” is installed, please read the package's message, which you can get by running pkg_info -D audit-packages.

If this package is installed, pkgsrc builds will use it to perform a security check before building any package. See Section 5.2, “Variables affecting the build process” for ways to control this check.