I just finished the arduous process of upgrading countless packages on DBSD 1.0, many of which required building through ports. Since I noticed this profound lack of ready binaries, I decided to save other users the trouble and make the packages I built available. They include full suite of the latest stable KDE 3.5.6 as well as many required dependencies. All you need to get it is here:
http://www.drivehq.com/folder/p1483445.aspx
You'll find there a capable and enhanced version of the aMule client for the eDonkey2000 network as well as a couple of .htm files containing links you can paste into it and download the files. If you'd like a free 1GB of online backup and much more follow this link and sign up yourself.
http://www.drivehq.com/secure/signup.aspx?refID=2454535
I have a little ftp server there, but the d/l bandwidth is limited, so it'd get used up fast. If anyone knows of a way to upload them to the official repositories or other appropriate ftp site I'm open to suggestions. Alternatively one of the admins could make this post sticky.
As a caution note I'd suggest to exit KDE and run it's upgrade from one of the skeleton window managers, so something in use wouldn't get lost(I got the crystalsvg icons erased once while upgrading).

Nice job, it's nice to see someone go out of thier way to help out like this.

Maybe you could contact the guy at freshports.org? to upload there, I don't know if that's acceptable or not but worth checking into anyway.

Thanks, I'll give it a shot. I tried to do the same with one of the Linux distros before, but I got nowhere. It would be a good idea if DesktopBSD provided a place for users to contribute their builds.

freshports.org only provides information about software available in the FreeBSD ports collection. FreshPorts itself does not distribute any package files. The ones used by the package manager and utilities like pkg_add and portupgrade are built by the FreeBSD project and hosted on their servers (see ftp://ftp.freebsd.org/pub/FreeBSD/ports/packages/). Unfortunately, they are not updated too often, especially new KDE releases often take two weeks or more to become available.

We are currently working on our own infrastructure for building and providing up-to-date binary packages for the i386 (32-bit) and amd64 (64-bit) architectures.
An additional place where users can provide their own packages would then be especially useful for packages built with custom options -- for example OpenOffice.org in a certain language. But there are a few things I'm concerned about:

• Legal issues when packages with redistribution restrictions are uploaded (e.g. LAME MP3 encoder or Java JRE)
• It would be very easy to upload malicious packages. This is also the reason FreeBSD doesn't allow any third-party packages on their server. Imagine Amarok deleting your music collection or Postfix with a back door for spam forwarding.
• Need for disk space. This might be circumvented by only providing torrents for the packages, but packages would become unavailable very fast then.

Peter

Apart from the other problems, isn't Java sourcecode free now?

>It would be very easy to upload malicious packages.

Trusted users only.

>Need for disk space.

Or maybe essential packages only, like KDE, Firefox, Gtk, qt, OpenOffice, big packages which are difficult to install.

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