> just trying to install the 1.6A snapshot, and same problem
> as with the 1.5ZC snapshot: sets/netbsd-GENERIC.tar is borken.

I spent some time investigating this (before I managed to get my
development system into an utterly broken state...).

I hope these snippets of information may be useful to somebody.

The problem is with the "tools" version of pax (`nbpax'): it fails to
build a valid archive.  (It is definitely not a compression problem:
the files that end up in the release tree are correctly compressed
versions of invalid archive files, if you see what I mean.)

The problem doesn't seem to be with the pax sources.  For one thing,
the pax that ends up in /bin/pax doesn't exhibit the same problem.
For another, the pax sources haven't changed much recently (I did try
backing out the only change to have happened in the last few weeks,
and it didn't make any difference).

So it looks likely to be some problem in the build process for
`nbpax', or maybe a compiler bug.  It was at about this point that I
broke my dev system :-(.

If I make any further progress, I'll let the list know.

Tim.