Just an interesting development I thought I might share.

jason@kanai:/home/jason$ pkg_info $PKG_PATH/cvs-1.11.21.tgz
<info and message displayed, LONG hang, poll on cpu>
</me>
<disk thrashing...>
rm: /home/jason: Permission denied
pkg_info: couldn't remove temporary dir '/home/jason'
jason@kanai:/home/jason$ ls -la
total 8
drwxr-xr-x  2 jason  users  512 May 22 14:40 .
drwxr-xr-x  3 root   wheel  512 Jul 25  2005 ..

So, I probably shouldn't have interrupted it. :D
After restoring what I had backed-up, and recreating what I didn't, I set up a
dummy account and did it again, with the same results, across random package
 names.
A -v flag shows it hanging right after sending an ftp close. pkg-info will sit
in poll on a random cpu indefinitely, and hitting ctrl-c either wipes the cwd,
or dumps core.
Thing is, this used to work. The only thing that has changed is a new ftp-proxy
at the gateway, but ftp everywhere seems to work just as it did before, across
several machines, and in fact, on this one as well outside of pkg_info.
This all happened a matter of hours ago, so I haven't examined the cores yet, or
really combed the source to figure out what could be happening.
Maybe someone who knows pkgsrc well could give me a clue where to start...

---
jason.