[talk] NetBSD beginner's question: Why is it so difficult to install packages?

[James E Keenan]

Today is my first day working on NetBSD.  Installing packages on NetBSD 
seems to be more complex than on FreeBSD or OpenBSD.  I suspect I'm 
missing something very basic (but not something obvious, obviously).

I. Background

I install various OSes as VirtualBox VMs, managed by Vagrant, on a 
FreeBSD-11 host.  With varying degrees of difficulty I have installed 
FreeBSD 11, 12 and 13 VMs and OpenBSD 6.3 and 6.4 hosts.  Today, with 
considerable difficulty, I installed a NetBSD-8.0 VM on this host.

One of the first challenges I face when working in a VM for a new OS is 
how to install packages.  In the FreeBSD-11 or -12 VMs, this is very 
simple.  As user 'vagrant', I say:

#####
sudo pkg install cmdwatch
#####

... and 'pkg' goes to the mirror (which happens to be maintained by 
NYCBUG), gets the latest version of 'cmdwatch', downloads and installs 
it.  Note that with this syntax I don't have to know either the URL to 
the mirror, the version number for the package, whether it's packaged as 
a '.tar.gz', a '.tgz' or whatever.

Remember that I said I manage these VMs via Vagrant?  Ensuring that I am 
always upgrading to the latest stable version of a package is easy.  I 
simply add a line to the SHELL script which is defined within the 
Vagrantfile and which runs with 'vagrant up' or 'vagrant reload 
--provision':

#####
sudo pkg install -y cmdwatch
#####

... where the '-y' means "upgrade if available."  The Vagrantfile does 
not need to know the URL to the mirror, the package version number, or 
its compression.  It just DWIMs.

II. The Current Problem

As far as I can tell from reading http://www.netbsd.org/docs/pkgsrc/ -- 
there sadly being no Michael W Lucas books on NetBSD available -- it 
appears I have to tell the machine the URL for the mirror and specify 
the exact version number for the package on that mirror.  For example, I 
had to call:

#####
PKG_PATH="http://cdn.NetBSD.org/pub/pkgsrc/packages/$(uname -s)/$(uname 
-m)/$(uname -r|cut -f '1 2' -d.)/All/"
#####

... which translated into:

#####
export 
PKG_PATH=http://cdn.NetBSD.org/pub/pkgsrc/packages/NetBSD/amd64/8.0/All/
#####

... and then call:

#####
sudo pkg_add -v "$PKG_PATH/perl-5.28.2.tgz"
#####

or

#####
sudo pkg_add -v "$PKG_PATH/watch-3.2.6nb4.tgz"
#####

All of which means that I have to manually search cdn.NetBSD.org to get 
the full URL.  And there's no way I can put a filename like 
'watch-3.2.6nb4.tgz' into a Vagrantfile and expect it to be maintainable.

What am I missing?  What is the NetBSD equivalent to FreeBSD's 'sudo pkg 
install -y perl5 vim git subversion screen wget cmdwatch'?

Thank you very much.
Jim Keenan