On Mon, 15 Jan 2007 20:35:46 -0500
Greg Troxel <gdt@ir.bbn.com> wrote:

> 
>   # cd /usr/pkgsrc/www/apache
>   # make
>   => Required installed package digest>=20010302: digest-20060826
> found Syntax error: "(" unexpected
> 
> This happened to me and I was totally baffled.  I built/installed
> pkgtools/pkg_install and then things worked.  So I suspect that
> something is wrong in the code after it decides that pkgtools are old
> but before it invokes 'make install' for the tools.
> 
> -- 
>     Greg Troxel <gdt@ir.bbn.com>
> 


this happened to me on non-BSD platforms, where /bin/sh -> <something>
and that something has different syntactic requirements for the shell
than the BSD conforming bourne shell. I coerced my way round it by
judicious use of <XXX>_SH environment variables passed into
make/build/pkgsrc procedures

there are some threads in mail on current/pkgsrc/help about this.

-George