It’s not like Saint Nick is going to bring me coal (besides, I’m Dutch: Sinterklaas was nearly three weeks ago). Instead, packaging efforts have been carrying on. I’ve advanced to KDEpim by now, which means that I have completed [ade]’s Simplistic Desktop - konsole, konqueror and kmail - once more. What this means is that we have a KDE4 desktop that hooks in to the existing libraries on the system, in order to reduce code duplication, reduce security issues (e.g. no private Kerberos, just use the one on the system; no private libgcrypt), and make things generally easier to ship.

When I say these are “available” that means “you can build them yourself by following the techbase instructions and by reading commit logs and telepathically re-creating the patch for FAAD2 that was lost”; the binary packages are, of course, on the workstation under my desk and aren’t being served up anywhere, yet. But rest assured that the bits are there.

As an illustration of what this means for package counts, there are 53 packages in the FOSS category on my nv104 box, and 90 on my nv101 box. That’s 37 packages we don’t have to build because they’re already there. And they’re doozies, like openldap. I did still need cyrus-sasl, since KDEpimlibs wants that and no other SASL implementation. If I feel entirely motivated I’ll try to nudge some Sun engineers into finding out if /usr/lib/libsasl.so can be used instead; to me it looks like the only difference is that Sun SASL is based on version 2.1.15, still.

Now that I have SysV packages on nv104, the next step is to turn them into IPS packages. Thanks to comments on an earlier entry for pointing me to a dead simple 7-step setup. There’s a svcadm enable application/pkg/server missing as step 3.5, as far as I can tell, but other than that it just works. I have an IPS server. Unfortunately, moving SysV packages into that IPS server means tarring them up, installing them as SysV packages on the OSOL machine, then using pkgsend(1), because that doesn’t seem to be available on plain nv104 – otherwise I could just push from the build machine to the OSOL machine. Something to do another day. Like, not on Christmas day.