kjetil@thomassen.priv.no said:
> It turns out that, for some unknown reason, CVS fails to update my
> arch directory with the arm directory from the anoncvs server. I can
> see it at http://cvsweb.netbsd.org/ but still it is not downloaded to
> my local sandbox. The sandbox is a on NetBSD/sparc 1.4 system running
> a pretty recent cvs 1.11 from pkgsrc. 

Did you use

 cvs update -dP

?

CVS only pulls new subdirs with the -d option.  -P causes it to purge 
empty directories as well.