Pkgsrc will occasionally maintain packages in the repository that no
longer have retrievable source tarballs and also legally restrict others
from hosting copies of them. The justification is that some older users
may still be in possession of the source tarballs, and the package is
maintained for these very few people.
Personally I disagree with this philosophy. Pkgsrc packages should be
buildable by anyone as a minimum requirement for being a package, and if
this capability is lost, I believe the package should be removed from
pkgsrc once it's clear the capability will never be regained.
Along the same vein, there are some packages that depend on sources that
one has to purchase. I wouldn't be shocked if all of these only worked
for NetBSD only.
Since the unavailable packages aren't getting removed upstream, I'm
going to mark them all NOT-FOR-DRAGONFLY. Currently this is less than
10 packages. The ones depending on commercially-purchased source
tarballs will also be marked NOT-FOR-DRAGONFLY.
For the vast majority of users, this will not affect you in the least
(unless you run the bulk build script, then your life will improve). If
you find yourself with sources to build one of these packages, you can
simply comment out the NOT-FOR-PLATFORM+= DragonFly-*-* line in the
Makefile before trying to build it.
John
- DragonFly pkgsrc policy for packages without freely or ... John Marino
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