I started to work on creating a GUI (X and curses) package administration
tool. (Does anyone know of any good online resources for standard BSD
curses programming beyond man pages?)

I noticed a Tcl/Tk script called tkpkg located under usr.sbin/pkg_install/
and also at pkgsrc/pkgtools/pkg_install/work/pkg_install/. It is not
installed and I see that tkpkg has not been worked on since May 1998. (On
a side note: why are the pkg_install utilities in two places?)

tkpkg can show all packages installed and show long description for a
selected package. I didn't test it, but it has functionality to install,
uninstall, and a broken "What can I install?" -- which tries to do:
 pkg_info -I -c [glob -nocomplain *.{tgz,tar.z,tar.gz,tar.Z}] |tr

Does anyone know the plan/status for tkpkg?

My plan is to write a tool for adding, removing and configuring NetBSD
software packages. Also, display all installed packages and package
dependencies -- and be able to check dependencies. And display package
descriptions. The tool should be able to build packages from the pkgsrc
tree or install from precompiled binary form (download or local). (Another
question: is there some setting that will tell where the pkgsrc tree --
pkgsrc/distfiles/ in particular -- is located? Or is
/usr/pkgsrc/distfiles/ the standard?)

I plan on doing this in C, but I also thought about doing it in perl/Tk.

Does anyone know of any similar projects? (I haven't checked FreeBSD yet.)

Does anyone have any advice or suggestion to help in my progress?

Thanks,

   Jeremy C. Reed
   http://www.reedmedia.net/