I meant to mention this earlier, but forgot until I was flipping through
some recent bookmarks.

When I was building the ramdisk image for my install kernel, the build fell
over at two points in distrib/utils/sysinst. I eventually found a post
mentioning the exact same problem on the port-vax list, but it was relating
to a 1.5 beta build and supplied a patch.

http://mail-index.netbsd.org/port-vax/2000/11/04/0004.html

It strikes me as interesting, after reading the message thread, that one
person hit the problem and another didn't. I'm guessing that from the beta
stage through to final release, nobody doing the official builds hit it -
but me and my poor little 3000 tripped it up - just like one specific
flavour of Vax. Given this is a part of the tree only used by people
building installation tools, not many people are going to be building it.

If anyone can shed some light on this little curiosity, I'd like to hear
about it.