Automates NetBSD builds
sysbuild is a tool to automate the maintenance of the NetBSD sources and the build of releases by means of a single command and a configuration file that tells sysbuild what to do.
Since NetBSD 1.6 (released on July 2011), the source tree has included a very flexible script (build.sh) to build a full NetBSD release for the current platform or to cross-build for any of the supported platforms.
The flipside of the flexibility is that the script is inconvenient to use on a daily basis because of the myriad of options it takes. Furthermore, managing the source trees that make up NetBSD is not in the scope of build.sh: the user must fetch these trees and keep them up to date by hand.
While these details are all fine on their own, rebuilding NetBSD frequently (to keep a system up to date, or just for development tasks) is convoluted. Developers and users usually find themselves writing their own wrapper scripts over build.sh to simplify their daily tasks.
sysbuild extends build.sh by adding support for configuration files and source tree management, allowing NetBSD rebuilds with a single and simple command.
sysbuild’s history is a long one. sysbuild 1.0 first appeared on November 15th, 2002 as the sysutils/sysbuild package in pkgsrc and the major 2.0 rewrite was published on July 25th, 2012 with a more robust codebase.
