Ideas and questions on pkgsrc

["Justin C. Sherrill" <justin@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

So, after seeing that PostgresQL is moving services from FreeBSD to Debian
because of ease of packaging, and seeing Ivan Voras's idea for a "stable"
branch of ports similar to the quarterly pkgsrc releases, I've been
thinking about the pkgsrc service.

(Here's the links for the aforementioned items:)

http://blog.hagander.net/archives/167-PostgreSQL-infrastructure-updates.html

http://ivoras.sharanet.org/blog/tree/2010-04-11.of-ports-and-men.html

Here's my thoughts.  Platform viability is being determined mostly by how
well it handles the software installation and availability.  Ports has
historically been a big reason for FreeBSD, and I'd argue that the best
thing in Debian/Ubuntu is apt-get.  PC-BSD has rolled their own packaging
method for similar reasons.  So, it stands to reason that the easier it is
to use pkgsrc on DragonFly, the better off DragonFly will be.  I've seen a
number of new people come into #dragonflybsd on EFNet recently asking
questions about their first install, and one of the first answers is
usually "pkg_radd".  I love that we have such an easy tool for quick
installs.

I and probably a good chunk of the people reading this are now used to
pkgsrc and DragonFly and can deal with various issues, but I worry that
being used to it makes it harder for us to see/fix these problems.  I'm
looking for some ideas or suggestions on what we could do.

I've been thinking -

 - A first-time guide on the website and maybe the LiveDVD desktop that
talks about common packages to install via pkg_radd so people don't have
to guess names.
 - Are there other contrib/ items we can move to pkgsrc?
 - Would it be useful to see all the bulk build reports from
i386/x86_64/2.6/2.7 that I build?
 - Would it be worth having a separate mailing list for those reports? 
They can be pretty frequent - several per day.
 - Should we explore putting more onto the LiveDVD?

Things I could use help with:
 - The crontab output from the bulk builds will list the new packages from
each build.  It's rsync output, so anything with a -> : "net/foo-1.2 ->
net/foo-1.2".  If someone can come up with a script that parses out those
lines from emails and can create an email or webpage showing what's
updated for which arch, that would really help people.
 - General ideas about the bulk builds and binary installs; I've been
staring at it so long I can't see the forest because there's all these
trees in the way.