> If someone is going to look at packages, a couple of thoughts
> 
> 1. You need to have bmake in addition to pkg-src for the package system to
> work.
> The regular distribution seems to be missing a couple of *.*.*.mk files.
> I didn't see any mention of this, and it took a while for me to figure out
> what was missing. This could be because I started from 1.2.1, but I have
> installed very recent -current tarballs.

If what you mean by "bmake" here is the standard NetBSD make(1), yes,
you "need to have bmake" - but you should have that in /usr/bin, even
on 1.2.1. I'm sorry that it wasn't possible to retrofit <bsd.port.mk>
and <bsd.port.subdir.mk> into /usr/share/mk on all the existing NetBSD
systems out there, but, hey, I've got a day job too, you know.

> 2. If you sup bmake, the default place for it is different from its place
> in the regular distribution, and a symlink has to be created for the pkg
> stuff to find it. Again, no problem, but if pkg is supposed to be easy, it
> isn't, quite.

I really don't understand what you're saying. I'm not sure if the
package system is supposed to be easy or not, but I know that it saves
me a lot of time re-inventing wheels, and making the same mods over and
over again. I'm also very aware that it's ungainly, very very ugly,
deficient if you want to be able to install packages when you're not
root (but the package system shares that honour with the current build
system, too), and that it hasn't found the promised cure for cancer,
made Glasgow Rangers into European Champions (but 9 League Championships
in a row aren't bad), or engendered world peace, but we decided to
leave some goals for the re-write.

And to quote a previous message to current-users about the package
system:

> From: Alistair Crooks <azcb0@juno.uts.amdahl.com>
> 
>
> 
> Johnny Chi-Lung Lam <jlbg+@andrew.cmu.edu> writes
> > I think you need to update /usr/share/mk/bsd.port.mk.  There were some
> > changes from a week or two ago dealing with the ARCH substitutions.
> 
> Just to clean up some loose ends here:
> 
> Johnny's quite right - you need to keep /usr/share/mk up-to-date
> if you're using the package system. Thanks, Johnny.
> 
> And for those of us who prefer to upgrade in bits, rather than the
> one-fell-swoop "make build" type approach, please keep an eye on the
> /usr/src/usr.sbin/pkg_install, as some changes went in this week which,
> among other things, add some new functionality (which isn't yet used in
> the pkgsrc tree, but might be at some later date).
>
> In general, the pkgsrc tree is aimed at -current. If you're running
> something older, you may well have to upgrade some of 
> 
> 	/usr/src/usr.bin/cksum
>	/usr/src/usr.bin/patch
>	/usr/src/etc/mtree
>	/usr/src/bin/mtree
>	/usr/src/gnu/usr.bin/tar
>	/usr/src/usr.sbin/pkg_install
>	/usr/src/share/mk
>
> (thanks to Michael Richardson for this list), and there may be others, too,
> and I can't guarantee any success. In particular, there was a bug in
> remove(3) that was fixed recently which you might find when attempting a
> pkg_delete on an installed package which contains symbolic links.
>
> If you want to sup the pkgsrc tree, then release=pkgsrc is the
> appropriate field you might like to have in your sup file. (It seems
> there are also daily tarfiles being made at the moment, too).