Confused, in need of direction

[Robert Nestor <rnestor%mac.com@localhost>]

I’m confused and lost in pkgsrc and could use a pointer to get my moving in the right direction.

Got a new laptop that doesn’t run any of the released versions of NetBSD, but it will run -current.  Now I’m trying to find and/or build packages that are compatible with -current to run on the darned thing.  Basically almost none of the packages in binary run because of vast differences in libraries; I’ve tried 7.0, 7.0.1, and 7.1 with little or no success.  OK, so that means building from source so I installed a version of pkgsrc (2016Q4) and ran a cvs update then went to building the ones I want.  Keep running into build problems.  Sometimes after a day or two things get updated in pkgsrc so I do an update and I get a little further, but it’s been a slow process.

Tried doing a “cvs update -A” as I understand this should get things building off the very latest pkgsrc (is that HEAD, current, stable or something else — not sure and haven’t found anything that tells me).  Yup, the 2016Q4 Tag disappeared in the CVS directories, so I know I’m on a different path now, but I’m not sure that works any better for me.  I’m still getting build errors in some of the packages I build, and like on the 2016Q4 path, updates sometimes get me a little further.  I’d post the errors I’m seeing but I’m not sure if I’m on the right pkgsrc path so I’m not sure if my errors are real and/or important to the pkgsrc efforts.

On top of this, things change if I install the very latest version of NetBSD -current and start the pkgsrc build efforts from the beginning.  Probably due to even more updates in versions of libraries?

Anyway, given that I’m stuck running a version of NetBSD -current on this system (it’s amd64 if that matters), what is the recommended version of pkgsrc I should be trying to use and how do I make sure that’s the path I’m on?  Secondly, if I do that and run into package build errors should I post them and if so, to which list?

Sorry for my ignorance, but thanks for the clues.
-bob