sacres@swattek.ca said:
> This package was installed via meta-packages/gnome, which didn't
> produce any readable configuration messages to my knnowledge (although
>   I didn't actually watch the console during the build

Such messages are written to the console during installation.
I agree that this is a bit unfortunate for meta-packages where
messages of sub-packages can get lost easily.
Requiring user input is worse IMO, since package installation
should work unattended.
Anyway, the messages are saved in the pkg database and can be
read later by "pkg_info -D". (if you guess there was one...)
In the gnome-screensaver case, it would have told you to install
a PAM configuration file to /etc/pam.d/gnome-screensaver which
you can copy from /usr/pkg/share/examples/gnome-screensaver/pam.d/.
(But better check before whether it matches your ideas of system
authentication; that's the reason this is not done automatically.)

best regards
Matthias