Major updates in pkgsrc-2010Q1

During the previous week the new stable package source branch pkgsrc-2010Q1 was created. Among the many new packages my favourites are clearly these three:

1. Samba 3.3.12
   NetBSD’s Samba package (version 3.0.37) is outdated and no longer supported by the Samba team. The new net/samba33 package provides a newer and above all still supported version. The upgrade worked without any problems on my home server and didn’t require any configuration changes.
2. PHP 5.3.2
   I’ve mentioned in the past that I have doubts about the security of PHP. But as PHP is required for the software used by my blog it is installed on my web server nevertheless. Since a few weeks pkgsrc provides the latest stable version via the lang/php53 package. As this version receives the best security support by the PHP project at the moment the new package helps me to keep my home server safe.
3. MySQL 5.1
   Sun (Oracle?) have recently announced the end of the active support for MySQL 5.0. Fortunately the new database/mysql51-server package provides MySQL 5.1 which is still fully supported until the end of this year.
   Updating my home server didn’t work very well initially because InnoDB support was missing (or not enabled?). However, in the meantime this has been fixed in pkgsrc. You therefore don’t have to dump and restore your database (although creating a dump before an update is always a good idea). Instead you only need to start the new server and run mysql_upgrade afterwards.

Owing to all these new packages I’m less concerned about the security of my home server, at least for now. For this I would like to thank Takahiro Kambe who added these packages to pkgsrc.