Hi Gary, 

I don't think this is the right list to be asking these questions, you
should probably have send it to netbsd-users (as it's not platform
specific). Here's some answers anyway.

Gary Parker(G.J.Parker@lboro.ac.uk) said 2004.08.06 15:01:28 +0000:
>  - I've got the pkgsrc sources via 'cvs checkout -P pkgsrc', does the CVS
> system automatically know I'm running -current rather than a formal release
> and bring down the current sources automatically or is the pkgsrc stuff
> independent of what OS version you're running?

With the cvs command you just check out the -current branch of pkgsrc. There
are several tags for situations where you might want some older (proven)
versions of applications. It does not do any checking of any sort on
operating system. The make system of pkgsrc does all of that on the fly.

>  - In a similar vein, now I have the 200407270000 automatic build running on
> my machine I want to compile my own kernel (and possibly the whole system).
> If I do 'cvs checkout -P src/sys' will this automatically get the source I
> need or do I need to specify a date and the fact that it's the current
> branch?

Depends on your needs. ;)

If you want a -current kernel, then just check it out. However, if you want
to keep your kernel and userland in sync, then give the appropriate date tag
to CVS.

>  - When I do 'make -j 3' for something in pkgsrc it fails because it's not
> correctly serializing the download of the code before it starts to actually
> compile. 

Out of personal experience, it is rarely good to do parallel tasks with make
in pkgsrc. Not a lot of packagers of software actually take parallel build
processes into account (I know I don't).

> Is there a way I can tell make to only start doing more than one
> job on the *actual* compile job rather than all the pre-build stuff?

I'm not sure.
	
	Wouter