I've followed up to current-users, because what I'm saying is not port
specific. 

Mathew wrote wrt installing on a sparc...

> when i was extracting the sets over nfs, it just prompted me with:
>   "File: []".  there was no list of the sets available!  i had to go
>   back to the server and look at the files and then remember which
>   ones i had extracted...

Sounds like maybe my config.sh would be useful after all.
An install_files.list like:

/ 0755 root wheel tar from /base.tar.gz
/ 0755 root wheel tar from /comp.tar.gz
/ 0755 root wheel tar from /man.tar.gz
/ 0755 root wheel tar from /misc.tar.gz
/ 0755 root wheel tar from /text.tar.gz
/ 0755 root wheel tar from /games.tar.gz
/ 0755 root wheel tar from `test -s /etc/group || echo /etc.tar.gz`

Would find say $CONFIGS/NetBSD/1.1/sparc/base.tar.gz, unpack it under
$DESTDIR/ and record the md5 checksum in $DESTDIR/etc/config_archives,
so that it would not be unpacked more than once.

Note that /etc.tar.gz would only be unpacked if $DESTDIR/etc/group did
not yet exist.  Note that you'll need config-sh-1.06 or later.

> the timezone query code only lists the first level of the Country/Area
>   TZ codes -- my code is Australia/Victoria, but, unless i knew that, i
>   would have been unable to do much cuz all i could get form it was that
>   Australia was a valid TZ code -- indeed, this would be incorrect as
>   Australia is *not* a valid TZ code.  perhaps something like the
>   Solaris method could be used here ...
>   but at least this section *did* tell you some of your options  :-)

I know this doesn't help for installing a single machine... but
I just add the following to $CONFIGS/$SITE/NetBSD/install_files.list

/etc/localtime 0775 root wheel symlink -> /usr/share/zoneinfo/Australia/Victoria


--sjg