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by snw 4268 days ago
Interesting article with historical context that goes 10 years back and many detailed insights!

Using pkgsrc at our company since a bit over a year has been excellent thanks to the great work from jperkin and many others. It is one of the tools i wish i had known earlier about since it makes life sooo much easier.

- Quartly stable releases mean that you have recent software most of the time.

- It is available on many platforms (OS X, Linux, SmartOS/Illumos, the BSDs, ...) so you can use the same packages on all your systems.

- Very easy to build binary packages of custom software / custom options / different versions / add your own patches. This is critical for most sysadmins/ops people - and if you ever tried to setup koji for CentOS you will love the simplicity of pkgsrc...

In my opinion pkgsrc is the most underappreciated "devops"-tool out there. It gave us much more control over our software stack and reduced the amount of work we had to put in to archive our goals.

I also expect the effort to reduce bulk-build times to further improve the software quality of all things in pkgsrc. Instead of weekly/daily bulk-builds (depending on the platform) it will be possible to have 4 or more reports a day. This quick feedback will make determining if/which commit broke/fixed something more immediate. Great stuff!