Dimitris Gounaridis reports progress on porting Enlightenment desktop to NetBSD as part of Google Summer of Code 2026. Key fixes include correcting the shutdown command to power off rather than halt the system, resolving an efreet cache error by increasing kernel file descriptor limits, and upstreaming window manager changes. Work continues on updating pkgsrc packages with the latest patches and fixes.
A developer explains how they use pkgsrc, a package management system, on Debian Linux to build software from source with a separate installation location for user packages. They bootstrap pkgsrc with Clang as the compiler and configure it to install packages in their home directory without requiring root privileges.
Pkgsrc is NetBSD's cross-platform package manager that builds packages from source and installs them to isolated directories like /usr/pkg or ~/pkg, allowing users to maintain a clean separation between their base system and installed software. The author began using pkgsrc in unprivileged mode to build Emacs locally in their home directory, appreciating its portability across Unix-like systems and its collection of Makefiles that define how to build each package from source.