Rakhesh Sasidharan wrote: 
> Could you tell me what it means by saying its possible to have
> multiple copies of the pkgsrc hierarchy? How does one go about doing
> that?

The pkgsrc team has adopted the policy of maintaining two distinct trees
of packages: the main tree ("HEAD", "pkgsrc" or "pkgsrc-current") with
all the latest packages, ongoing work and inherent instability for
short periods of time and one other tree, called according to the time
it was branched from the main tree ("pkgsrc-2005Q4", "pkgsrc-2006Q1", ...).

The latter contains the packages avalaible at that time (for pkgsrc-2006Q1
this was late March 2006) and only sees fixes for security reasons.

  (three cheers for the hardworking pkgsrc-security team)

On the machine I am typing this I have

  $ ls -1d pkgsrc*
  pkgsrc
  pkgsrc-2005Q3
  pkgsrc-2005Q4
  pkgsrc-2006Q1

If you intermix packages from more than one pkgsrc tree, please be aware
that you are on your own with respect to possible problems and you should
know what you are doing.

> Also, what does the author mean when he/ she says that a copy of
> pkgsrc can contain lot of CVS directories? I didn't understand that
> either. The command given there by the author is similar to the
> command used for updating the CVS tree -- so what's the author trying
> to say?

I guess the author wanted to distinguish between pkgsrc trees with CVS
directories, which are updateable with the "cvs" command and those
without. The CVS directories contain administrative information
necessary for the "cvs" command.
Personally, I haven't seen the latter form.

ciao
     Klaus