On Fri, Nov 15, 2002 at 11:02:29AM -0800, Jeremy C. Reed wrote:
> Why do some packages check if software is already in the base (default)
> installs?
> 
> For example, sysutils/user doesn't want to install if it isn't NetBSD and
> /usr/sbin/user exists.
> 
> This doesn't matter.
> 
> Does it matter if you choose to install both /usr/pkg/sbin/useradd and
> /usr/sbin/useradd?

It matters to me, since I dislike playing Russian roulette with PATH
settings - I have always found that these things come back and bite me
in the bottom.
 
You obviously don't share the same experience.

Let me explain further - in the first few months of pkgsrc, I had a
FreeBSD partition mounted on none of my machines.  Try as I might, I
couldn't get the cdrecord package to build properly on NetBSD.  I
tried many things to do this, and it was only when I added some
debugging information to a target in bsd.port.mk (as it was then) that
I discovered that I was exec'ing a gmake binary for FreeBSD, under
emulation.  That was when the DEPEND stuff grew an indication of the
full pathname of the binary that was needed.

Regards,
Alistair