On Mon, 29 Jun 1998, David Forbes wrote:

> Dear All,
> 
> I've been trying to compile some packages lately from the pkgsrc tree, but
> I've come across a problem: some of them complain that they
> 
> 	can't find "../../mk/bsd.prefs.mk"

Sounds like your are missing some files from pkgsrc/mk/ 

i.e.
# cd pkgsrc/mk/
# ls
CVS                 bsd.pkg.mk          bsd.prefs.mk
bsd.own.mk          bsd.pkg.subdir.mk   mk.conf.example

> Is there a reason why I don't have this file?  (I've installed the pkgsrc
> set from the 1.3 distribution, and have been supping the tree every day.)
> Since it is a "prefs" file, does anything important go in it, or can I
> just create a blank file?  (Which i'm about to try...)

I would have expected you got this via sup.
It is not a blank file. Mine looks something like

# $NetBSD: bsd.prefs.mk,v 1.1 1998/06/03 11:15:29 agc Exp $
#
# Make file, included to get the site preferences, if any.  Should
# only be included by package Makefiles before any .if defined()
# statements, to make sure any variables defined in /etc/mk.conf or
# $MAKECONF are used.

.if !defined(OPSYS)
OPSYS!= /usr/bin/uname -s
.endif

.if defined(MAKECONF) && exists(${MAKECONF})
.include "${MAKECONF}"
.elif ${OPSYS} == "FreeBSD" && exists(/etc/make.conf)
.include "/etc/make.conf"
.elif exists(/etc/mk.conf)
.include "/etc/mk.conf"
.endif

 
> Finally, is this an arm32 specific thing (or my-installation-specific)? 

Nope

> Whilst it obviously doesn't directly dpend on the hardware, I've had this
> error from several major packages, which I assume must work on the other
> platforms?

There are certain packages that may not build correctly on the arm. There
are several reasons.
1. Missing configuration information. Some packages to not recognise
NetBSD running on ARM and thus fail to configure correctly.
2. GCC bugs. Some packages may have files that will crash the compiler if
optimisation is used.

Cheers,
				Mark