Richard Rauch wrote:
> I was making a local package and because I wasn't sure which files
> might have been added, I removed the PLIST (planning to do make
> print-PLIST when done).  Without any PLIST file in the package
> directory, the package (a library) froze up around here:
 >
> Looking at top, I noticed that root had an awk process started.
> But the CPU was completely idle.

This is the typical behavior of Unix programs that expect a list of file 
names to process. Most likely, somewhere there's a command like

     ${AWK} '{print $$0}' ${ALL_PLIST_FILES}

When ${ALL_PLIST_FILES} is empty, the program is executed as follows:

     awk '{print $0}'

Which reads from stdin instead of the (empty) list of files.

There are two solutions (for pkgsrc developers):

     ${AWK} '{print $$0}' /dev/null ${ALL_PLIST_FILES}

This hides some bugs, as an empty PLIST files list is generally 
unexpected. The other one is

     .if !empty(ALL_PLIST_FILES)
     PKG_FAIL_REASON+=	"No PLIST files specified."
     .else
     ...
     .endif

Roland