My first experience with the package collection is pretty frustrating up
to this point. I made a typo in /etc/mk.conf and needed to deinstall a
package. Now I seem to be having two problems:

First, there seems to be a mis-match between the path of the packages
database used by the pkg_* tools when I use them from a shell, and when
they get invoked by make in the pkgsrc directory. The tools operate on
/var/db/pkg which the documentation says is the default. I also set that
as the value for PKG_DBDIR in mk.conf, but it made no difference when
invoked from make. In some cases, make is kind enough to show me that it
is using "-k /usr/src/NetBSD-new-build/var/db/pkg" as an argument to the
pkg_* tools, but I haven't found where that is coming from. 

Okay, I think I just figured it out. According to the BUILDING document
in the head of /usr/src, the default name of the make configuration file
is /etc/mk.conf. One of the make variables enumerated there for system
builds is DESTDIR - the "Directory to contain the built NetBSD system."
It's the same as giving -D to build.sh, so I set it to the value I used
when building the system according to the instructions in
http://www.netbsd.org/Documentation/current/.

So, /etc/mk.conf is also used by the makefiles in the package
collection, and it seems to be prepending DESTDIR to the path for the
packages database. Packages.txt mentions DESTDIR in relation to a
chrooted sandbox. It seems to me there is something out of whack here,
but I would certainly admit to the possibility of not understanding. If
anyone can shed some light on this for me, I would appreciate it.

The second issue I have is that I set the option in the mk.conf file to
gzip man page files, however they get installed without being gzipped.
And, I get errors like "ls: /usr/pkg/man/man1/bletch.1.gz: No such file
or directory." Does gzipping work?
-- 
C. Linus Hicks <lhicks@nc.rr.com>