pkgsrc: Yesterday's changes

It has been a while since I've done any "big" changes in pkgsrc, basically because I've been quite busy with VCS Made Easy during the past month. To make things worse, I've got back to university and there is a lot of work to do.

But anyway, yesterday I was able to finish two major changes I had going on. The first one was the update of GNOME to 2.8.3, which was released past Wednesday. This version features several bug fixes and minor improvements, as you can expect from any minor release. Hopefully, 2.10 will be released in less than three weeks; but that will require a lot more of work.

The second one was a complete reorganization of the Boost packages, as I announced some days ago in another post. Previously, there was a single and big boost package that provided almost everything (OK, there were two more, providing threading and Python support, but they were somewhat ugly). After the changes, you can find this:

• devel/boost-build: Provides the bjam utility, the Boost.Build's core program. This is just a build dependency for all the other packages.
• devel/boost-docs: Installs all documentation files; made optional because they are quite big and you can usually access them online.
• devel/boost-headers: Provides all the header files required at build time. This is also a build dependency and, due to the nature of Boost, many libraries are only required at this stage (i.e., the final program won't need any extra libraries to run).
• devel/boost-libs: Builds and installs all binary libraries in threaded form, except Boost.Python (to avoid a dependency on Python when not wanted).
• devel/boost-python: The Boost Python binary library. This package is very similar to the one we had before, but now works.
• meta-pkgs/boost: A meta package that depends on all of the above, to ease the installation of a complete Boost suite.

Furthermore, there are also some internal changes in the way the libraries are built. On the one hand, threading is always enabled; not doing so adds too much complexity and breaks Boost.Python. On the other hand, all stuff is installed unversioned; this eases a lot the build of programs outside pkgsrc. You can also find some other changes, but these are, maybe, the major ones.

Enjoy!