The following reply was made to PR pkg/34207; it has been noted by GNATS.

From: Woodchuck <djv@bedford.net>
To: gnats-bugs@NetBSD.org
Cc: grant@NetBSD.org, gnats-admin@NetBSD.org, pkgsrc-bugs@NetBSD.org
Subject: Re: pkg/34207 (/usr/pkgsrc/Makefile  -- "make index" deletes INDEX's
 dependency PKGDB)
Date: Tue, 2 Jan 2007 08:45:59 -0500 (EST)

 On Tue, 2 Jan 2007, Joerg Sonnenberger wrote:
 
 > There are two parts involved here. The removal itself is one part, the
 > dependency on PKGDB another. Before the explicit dependency forced a
 > rebuild of INDEX everytime it was used as dependency e.g. of the search
 > target. Now it only does that when called explicitly via "make index".
 
 Ah, yes.  I forgot what my original gnat was about!  Please attribute
 this to holiday over-exuberance.
 
 > >  Since this is many, many hours of CPU work, I did not
 > >  think that was the intent.  But now I do believe it is the intent
 > >  of the author.  Otherwise, a messy dependency chain to create PKGDB
 > >  would be necessary, and make would probably take longer to check it
 > >  than to create PKGDB from nothing.
 >
 > I don't even think we can cleanly express a correct dependency chain for
 > PKGDB without doing something like depending on all Makefiles +
 > buildlink3.mk files. That's why I removed the dependency of PKGDB.
 
 I concur.  I can imagine a horrifying special program to do this.
 I shudder at the thought!  Then there is the problem of updating
 a single record of PKGDB, which is also "scary".  The tangible 
 benefits would be so small as to make the project a case study in
 inappropriate effort.
 
 > The reason why I asked whether the behaviour works as intented is that
 > one additional question is unresolved. When we recreate PKGDB and build
 > the index, should it try to minimise the time it is non-existing or not?
 > I don't think it matters, but you might differ :-)
 
 Nope, I view building PKGDB as a periodic admin task, justified only
 after say cvs'ing on the latest full quarterly tag.
 
 Thanks for your work on this!
 
 Dave