It was forked from the FreeBSD ports collection in 1997 as the primary package management system for NetBSD.

It is the native package manager on NetBSD, SmartOS and MINIX 3, and is portable across 23 different operating systems, including AIX, various BSD derivatives, HP-UX, IRIX, Linux,[4] macOS,[5] Solaris, and QNX.

The pkgsrc bootstrap contains a traditional ports collection that utilizes a series of makefiles to compile software from source.

A high-level utility named pkgin also exists, and is designed to automate the installation, removal, and update of binary packages in a manner similar to Debian's Advanced Packaging Tool.

[5][4] On October 3, 1997, NetBSD developers Alistair Crooks and Hubert Feyrer created pkgsrc[1] based on the FreeBSD ports system and intended to support the NetBSD packages collection.