FreeBSD's Pkg 1.5.0 Released, Brings Initial Ports To OS X & NetBSD

The FreeBSD pkg tool for binary package management has been upgraded to pkg v1.5.0. The pkg 1.5 release brings with it a number of exciting imporvements.

The pkg 1.5.0 release finally introduces the concepts of "provides" and "requires" for package management, many new regression tests were added, message reporting improvements, global memory usage reduction and speed-ups are present, improvements to the pkg solver, the pkg.h header file is now C++ friendly, and many of bugs were fixed in the process.

Pkg 1.5.0 is also the project's first official release with initial support for Mac OS X as well as NetBSD/EdgeBSD.

More details on the pkg 1.5.0 changes can be found via the FreeBSD release announcement.

Among the items being planned for pkg 1.6.0 that were mentioned in today's announcement is safe cherry-picking of upgrades, new context dependent messages, a possible Linux package back-end, allowing multiple versions of a given package in a repository, and improved documentation.