inquiry regarding "best practices" for chrooted pkgsrc development and other things

[Blair Sadewitz <blair.sadewitz%gmail.com@localhost>]

Hello,

I'm getting back into NetBSD/pkgsrc development after an excessive
hiatus.  I fear my skills have atrophied.

At any rate, I've already read myriad documents at some point in time
about various methods for setting up chrooted builds, etc.--although
they seem usually to be geared toward bulk builds.  The system I'm
using right now isn't any sort of production system--except for
me--but I'd like to pretend that it is.

I would like to do all of my development and package building in a
sandbox to help me catch pkgsrc bugs as well as my own errors.  Is
that overkill?  Am I driving myself crazy for no reason?  I'd like to
get in the habit of keeping /var /home and /usr separate.  The plan is
to have this machine act as a file and web server in addition to my
personal shell machine eventually, so I'd like to plan the layout with
that in mind.

I only have one xen instance to play around with for the time being.,
though it does have 4 vcpus and ~40GB of disk  I have the latest
netbsd-6 snapshot installed on it now, but I think I'm going to go
back to current so that I can be _forced_ to do more meta-development
at the very least. ;-)

I'd appreciate any suggestions/configuration details/examples of how
more seasoned developers do this sort of thing.  Perhaps I should
re-learn all of the git that I forgot and use joerg's mirror to track
my own changes?  Hmm.

There are so many options, and I'm still stuck on how best to allocate
my disk space. ;-)  I don't _have_ to put myself through this, of
course; I could have just created one large partition and done all of
my development in one tree without caring about correctness, overuse
of superuser privileges, etc, but I'd like to start out doing this
right.  Not that I don't enjoy spending hours on sysadmin tasks
without getting anything done, but ... ;-)

Thanks for any suggestions,

--Blair