[HEADSUP & CFT] pkg 1.0rc1 and schedule

Hi,

On behalf of the pkgng team I'm really pleased to announce pkg 1.0 RC1 (aka pkgng)

Only bug fixes will be accepted in the RC phase.

What is pkg
-----------
pkg is a new package manager for FreeBSD. It is designed as a replacement for
the pkg_* tools, and as a full featured binary package manager.

It provides a library that does all the work, and a frontend to be used by users

The ports tree is already able to transparently switch to pkgng by default by
adding WITH_PKGNG=yes to your make.conf

It provides a pkg2ng tool to help converting from an old installation to a new
one.

Test repositories are available on http://pkgbeta.freebsd.org/ (I try to update
them as fast as I can)

It will live forever in the ports tree (with a binary bootstrap in 9 and 10)

Why pkg?
--------
pkg_* tools have become hardly maintainable over the time, it lacks lots of
features most of people are expecting from a package manager:
  - binary upgrade
  - ability to search information about remote packages
  - real reverse dependency tracking
  - tracking leaves
  - many more.

Third party tools
-----------------

Tools supporting natively pkgng
  - ports-mgmt/portupgrade-devel (soon the main portupgrade will support)
  - ports-mgmt/pkg_cutleaves
  - ports-mgmt/poudriere
  - ports-mgmt/portdowngrade
  - ports-mgmt/tinderbox-devel (support can be improved)

Tools supporting pkgng via a patch (I hope it will be reviewed/integrated soon)
  - ports-mgmt/portmaster (https://github.com/pkgng/pkgng/blob/master/ports/patch-portmaster-pkgng)

Tools being worked on (or I heard people are interested) :
  - salt support (in version 0.10) http://salt.readthedocs.org/en/v0.10.0/ref/modules/all/salt.modules.freebsdpkg.html
  - cfengine support
  - puppet support: (https://github.com/xaque208/puppet-pkgng)
  - ruby bindings: (https://github.com/baloo/libpkg-ruby/)
  - PackageKit

Links
-----
  - http://wiki.freebsd.org/PkgPrimer
  - http://wiki.freebsd.org/pkgng

Please report bugs in the github issue tracker:
  - http://github.com/pkgng/pkgng

Schedule
--------

The plan is to switch the ports tree to pkgng on CURRENT by default on July 25th
No dates are planned yet for other branches.

Note that there will be a NO_PKGNG knob for some time (undefined yet) for people
not will to switch on July 25th

Please also note that some ports won't work with pkgng right now, because pkgng
is more strict than pkg_install on purpose.
The major one is: nvidia drivers, because pkgng does not allow to overwrite a file
owned by another package, and we will not accept any hacks for that in pkgng.

Road to next version
--------------------

The road to the next version is already open and lots of work will happen, list
of ideas:
  - remote repositories will be able to display update messages
  - optionnal remote files repository to be able to search which packages to
    install if you want a known binary
  - real solver,
  - better support for multi repository
  - provides/requires support
  - stabilisation of the library API
  - reduce as much as possible scripting in packages to allow cross installation
  - many more :D

regards,
Bapt