Question about i386 binary package availability, vs amd64

[blackhole]

I have NetBSD 7.0 i386 installed on my old netbook.

On searching a few repository mirrors for packages, it seems that there are only a limited number available for NetBSD 7.0 i386. e.g.

http://ftp.fr.netbsd.org/pub/pkgsrc/.../i386/7.0/www/
http://ftp.netbsd.org/pub/pkgsrc/pac.../i386/7.0/www/

For 7.0 amd64 and 6.1.5 i386 and amd64 it seems that all packages are available.

Is this just a case of it being a work in progress or what am I missing?

Thanks

[darktrym]

Use pkgsrc.se for searching. And the complete collection without wip are under All.

[blackhole]

Thanks, I didn't know about pkgsrc.se ...

I did know about all packages being in 'all', just gave 'www' as an example. My question really is: Why are there hardly any packages for i386? Is this normal, i.e. early in the release cycle. Where can I read about that?

[shep]

On searching a few repository mirrors for packages, it seems that there are only a limited number available for NetBSD 7.0 i386. e.g.

My understanding is that
ftp://nyftp.netbsd.org
is designated to build amd64 and i386 binary packages. The other repositories mirror that build site.

The NetBSD structure is markedly different than OpenBSD or FreeBSD where binary packages are available at the same time as the release. In the case of the recent 5.8 OpenBSD release, packages appeared on the servers before the core distribution.

This is in part due to the massive task of trying build binaries for all the different architectures and not having the resources to produce timely builds. The limited number of available i386 binary packages are those that built on the first pass. The others were missing a dependency and did not build on the first build cycle. Correcting the build scripts occurs incrementally and often requires multiple builds. For this reason, you are more likely to get a complete system if your use slightly older binaries, ie Q2 as opposed to the newly released Q3. Since NetBSD 7.0 is a new release, there are no prior builds for i386. AMD64 binaries were mostly compiled using a Release Candidate core.

[blackhole]

Thanks, it's as I suspected then.

[shep]

October 21, 2015

The binary package directory at http://nyftp.netbsd.org/pub/pkgsrc/p...etBSD/i386/7.0 was updated today with a significant increase in the number of packages.

[blackhole]

Yes installing a browser or two right now.

Thanks again