Table of Contents:

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pkgng is built on top of libpkg, a new library to interface with package registration backends.

It abstracts package management details such as registration, remote repositories, package creation,

updating, etc.

pkgng uses a new +MANIFEST file to describe a package. It is very similar to

the old +CONTENTS file, but cleaned (no more @comment which in fact can be an

faster to decompress than bzip2, thus allow faster installation with a smaller

archive file. Of course, pkgng can manage .tbz, .tgz and .tar archives as well.

Once a package is installed, it is registered to a SQLite database.

database from the ports. The register command can execute the install script,

show pkg-message, ...

`pkg add' can install a package archive from the local disk, on from a

retote FTP/HTTP remote server.

`pkg add' will check if the user attempts to install a package built for another

arch or release.

pkgng will also support upgrades of binary packages.

pkgng will compare the versions of installed packages and those available on

the repository. It will compute the proper update order and apply them.

Directory leftovers are automatically removed if they are not in the MTREE.

To use pkgng from ports currently we need to include *bsd.pkgng.mk* in *bsd.port.mk*,

the line before *.if defined(USE_LOCAL_MK)*

In this section of the document we will try to give a quick and dirty introduction

on the practical usage of pkgng - installing packages, searching in remote package

repositories, updating remote package repositories and installing from them, etc.

The first thing to start with is to get pkgng installed on your machine.

	# cd pkgng/ports

	# sh pkg2ng

In order to get help on any of the pkgng commands you should use the 'pkg help <command>'

command, which will take the man page of the specified command.

	# pkg help 

	# pkg help <command>

Packages can be installed from either a local directory on the file system or from

a remote location using the FTP/HTTP protocol in order to fetch the packages.

For more information on installing packages on your FreeBSD system, please refer to pkg-add(1)

In order to get information about installed packages you need to use the 'pkg info' command.

For more information on querying the local package database, please refer to pkg-info(1) man page.

The good thing about pkgng is that it is able to use remote package repositories.

Please check the included sample 'repositories' file for example definitions of remote

packages repositories and pkg.conf(5) for the file format of the file.

The first thing to do when working with remote repositories is to update from them.

For more information on the remote repositories, please refer to pkg-update(1).

You can search in the remote package repositories using the 'pkg search' command.

For more information on the repositories search, please refer to pkg-search(1)

In order to install a package from a remote repository you need to set the

PACKAGESITE environment variable to point to the remote server.

For more information on the remote package installs, please refer to pkg-install(1)

It is a good idea that you backup your local package database on regular basis.

For more information on backing up your local package database, please refer to pkg-backup(1)

* The Git repository of [pkgng is hosted on Github][1]