In message <Pine.NEB.3.93.970324125037.4096V-100000@cynic.portal.ca> Curt Sampson writes:
: of thing. To me, that says it would be a very good idea to go with
: the FreeBSD system and be as compatable as we can with them. They've
: done a lot of work in this area and I've heard noises that they
: would be willing to look at a combined `BSD ports' package; let's
: take advantage of this.

Let me reiterate my offer: I will integrate such patches that others
come up with to the FreeBSD ports system to make it work on NetBSD.
So long as those patches don't break the FreeSBD or OpenBSD stuff,
there should be no problems with this.  I'm already doing this with
OpenBSD.  I don't have the time or resources to do it myself, however.
I barely have time to do the work for OpenBSD's ports tree.

: If that means installing stuff under /usr/local rather than
: /usr/contrib, well, I don't like that very much, but it's a price

A speacial case could be made in the FreeBSD bsd.port.mk file if
NetBSD wanted to have a different PREFIX than other systems.  However,
I'd strong suggest that you'd want to keep most of the same defaults
to remain compatible and to not violate the principle of least
surprise.

Warner