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A comment on NetBSD 11 desktop on a Raspberry Pi 4. Parent comment

Re:NetBSD 11 desktop on a Raspberry Pi 4 by rustyhancock on Tuesday November 10, 2026 @11:01AM (#50442223)
If you're familiar with Debian tools pkg_add is like dpkg in this case it's used to install the package containing pkgin which is like apt.

Pkg_add simply installs binaries you ask it to and dependencies but can't do searches or broader package management like pkgin.

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Re:NetBSD 11 desktop on a Raspberry Pi 4 by cyberpunk on Tuesday November 10, 2026 @12:17PM (#50443280)
how does it find pkgin then? it’s not pkg_add ./pkgin but presumably downloads it?

or is it just some special case?

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Re:NetBSD 11 desktop on a Raspberry Pi 4 by rustyhancock on Tuesday November 10, 2026 @12:28PM (#50443399)
PKG_PATH is set and pkg_add automatically adds details to make it point to a package.

With PKG_PATH set (he does it in the .profile in the blog post)

pkg_add pkgin becomes pkg_add https://cdn.NetBSD.org/pub/pkgsrc/packages/NetBSD/$(uname -m)/$(uname -r | cut -d_ -f1)/All/pkgin

I prefer to do it that way since pkgin has its own repository config, and if I use pkg_add after installing pkgin it'll be to install packages from the pkgsrc and that might clash if PKG_PATH is set.

I know it seems contrived.

https://www.netbsd.org/docs/pkgsrc/using.html

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