So the pkgsrc tree has been frozen in preparation for the 2011Q3 release. I managed to sneak in a few interesting commits just after the deadline *cough*. Firstly, Python 2.6 and 2.7 now build fine. The corresponding Python bug was marked wontfix though—even though it only touches six lines or so. Apparently they have a policy not to support what they call “marginal platforms” even when people submit them patches. Compare to perl, where more changes were required, but they were all committed upstream, and all new releases support MirBSD out of the box.

The second change concerns X11. Many new packages want to have X11R7 and/or xcb libraries, which our X11 does not provide. Thus, after a some discussion on tech-pkg, I switched the MirBSD platform to modular X libraries. This means that libX11 etc. are built as packages inside pkgsrc instead of relying on /usr/X11R6. If you already use pkgsrc, you might need to recompile X11-using packages after this change, or use pkg_rolling-replace. Incidentally, I had to fix a few bugs in libX11 ;).

The final thing concerns the texlive packages, which should all be working now. They were using pax -rw to copy files around without creating the destination directory first. This is an error condition in paxmirabilis, and it should also be elsewhere. For example, pax in Darwin accepts it although the manpage says otherwise. Strange.