For managing multiple hosts with NetBSD, is rdist/sdist the right tool?

If so, certainly it is ugly to have an Distfile in every program's directory
(not to mention inefficient), so is the idiom to do a "make install" to
some "image" directory, then blast that out via rdist?

From an aesthetic perspective, where should one put that image directory
(assuming it wasn't /)?  It probably shouldn't be in /tmp, since that
might be a mfs; maybe it should go in /var/tmp; automatically making a
subdir of the cwd is capricious... comments?

Also, one might not want to overwrite /var/log, so you'll need to
put some thought into what to dist; could anyone provide a sample
distfile?

It seems like it would be useful to have a boot floppy that brought
the machine up to a state ready to receive an rdist, yes?  I had
problems getting inetd/rsh happy.  Does anyone have a list of the
required programs?  I could find them out but it takes significant
effort, since little or no debugging info is provided.

Please keep me in the addressees, as I'm not on this list.
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VaX#n8 - Little, Yellow, Different