Date:        Thu, 5 Jun 2003 11:24:31 -0500 (CDT)
    From:        Frederick Bruckman <fredb@immanent.net>
    Message-ID:  <Pine.NEB.4.53.0306051116230.621@rapture.immanent.net>

  | "pkgsrc" only began experimenting with branches leading up to the
  | NetBSD 1.6 release. As of now, the most current and best supported
  | branch in pkgsrc (besides the HEAD itself) is netbsd-1-6-1. At this
  | point in time, that branch is expected to get only build fixes and
  | security fixes, so that sounds like your best bet.

The problem with attempting to use an old version (any old version) of
pkgsrc is that unless you prefetched every distfile that you're ever
going to need, you're going to find one day that a package that you
want to build from the old(ish) pkgsrc won't, because the distfile it
requires can no longer be located anywhere.

Even where ftp.netbsd.org is attempting to keep everything, there are plenty
that can't be redistributed that way (often precisely because the authors
of the program want to be able to make old versions go away).

I'd suggest sticking to current (head of tree) pkgsrc always.   That doesn't
guarantee that the distfiles can always be found, but you have much better
chances.   And everything can be built on NetBSD 1.6.1 (or 1.6) or should
be able to be.

As has been mentioned, sometimes updates that you don't really care about
are required because something that you do want demands it (usually for
no good reason - almost all my private pkgsrc changes are to cause
packages to be more lenient in which other versions they require) and
that then requires that you reinstall lots of other things that depend
upon it.   Much of that can be avoided by finding, and installing, pkg_hack
(which really should be in the pkgtools category).

kre