How to use binary packages on secondary systems?

["The masked-coder known as Randux" <randux%Safe-mail.net@localhost>]

Hi guys,

New to NetBSD and really liking it. I've run OpenBSD since 3.8 and I now have 
desktop machines running FreeBSD 6.2 and NetBSD 3.1 as well. I'd personally 
like to see NetBSD's pkgsrc used for all of FreeBSD and OpenBSD's ports as I 
think it's a much better system.

I installed NetBSD 3.1 and built a lot of binary packages. I would have built 
everything with "make package" but I didn't figure it out until after I had 
installed a few big packages with make && make install.

I want to be able to use the binary packages I built on system A on a new 
system B. I rsyncd /usr/pkgsrc/packages/ to system B but usually when I change 
to the directory of a specific pkg and do make bin-install on system B, it 
tries to go to some IPV6 URL as if my packages don't exist even though it shows 
that /usr/pkgsrc/packages/All is in the path. A few packages it did find and 
installed them very quickly, so it does work sometimes but I can't see what's 
causing the make bin-install not to work at other times.

I find it works much better when I cd to /usr/pkgsrc/packages/All and do 
pkg_add pkgname.tgz. If there isn't a preferred way I may continue with this. 
One thing that doesn't seem optimal here is that the dependency tracking seems 
to be affected. For example, I got a few warnings which said "dependency 
changed to reflect manual installation" or something like that.

I had a long look at the pkgsrc user's guide but I didn't understand how pkgsrc 
and packages are intended to be used when building packages on one system and 
then distributing them to secondary systems. My intention is to build them on 
my fastest machine and then send them round my LAN to other machines so that 
everything will be at the same level. I don't want to disturb the dependency 
tracking. And I prefer to rsync the packages rather than running FTP or NFS.

So here's my enquiry in a nutshell: what is the proper way to use binary 
packages built on one system, on another system? (Both are x86. Hope to be 
running the macppc port soon also)

Thanks,
Rand