Actually, when OpenBSD switched to FAKE for most of its packages, we decided
to keep manual packing-lists for a few reasons.

First, because this forces the porter to have a look at the packing-list,
which is very good for catching glitches. I am afraid a human eye is
always required in such matters.

Second, because this does not need to be tedious: it is quite possible to have
a script that generates very good packing-list approximations.

Finally, having the packing-lists part of the tree makes some automated 
treatments easier: doing statistics on all packages from source, finding
packages that conflict due to common installed file, is much more
light-weight.  It is also much easier for anyone to look directly at what
files a package contains just from the pkgsrc tree, without having to download
(usually) much larger binary packages, or recreate them.
-- 
	Marc Espie		
|anime, sf, juggling, unicycle, acrobatics, comics...
|AmigaOS, OpenBSD, C++, perl, Icon, PostScript...
| `real programmers don't die, they just get out of beta'