On Sun Jun 05, 2005 at 12:39:45PM -0700, Tom Nakamura wrote:
> Hi
> Although I find pkgsrc contains 95% of the software I need, I'm left
> without the other 5%. For example, I needed the ruby-sdl package the
> other day and apparently its not in pkgsrc. In such a situtation, is
> there an easier way to install the software besides creating my own
> entry in the pkgsrc tree? (I want to avoid it for the time being b/c it
> seems overly complex judging from the docs..) Is it safe to do a simple
> "./configure --prefix=/usr/pkg; make; make install"? "port2pkg" doesn't
> seem to work too well either.
> Tom Nakamura

Its a matter of choice.  Most source tarballs choose prefix as /usr/local.
I stick with this so that my /usr/local contains things I've compiled and
/usr/pkg are controlled by pkgsrc.  

Seperation keeps things sane because when you see a library or binary 
in /usr/pkg and you want to know what pkg its a part of you can run
for example:

pkg_info -Fe /usr/pkg/lib/libgdasql.so
libgda-1.2.0

If you put things in /usr/pkg that are not pkg controlled, then you 
will can have mixed installs, and there would be a possibility of overwriting
something in /usr/pkg.

When using /usr/local as a site based repository the only thing you have to worry 
about is setting compiler flags so that source tarballs know about your 
dependancies that may be in /usr/pkg.

so you may want to set, before running ./configure --prefix=/usr/local, :
LDFLAGS='-L/usr/pkg/lib -R/usr/pkg/lib'
CFLAGS='-g -I/usr/pkg/include'
CXXFLAGS='-g -I/usr/pkg/include'

-- 
Courtney R. Spencer