Hello Andy!

  AR> If you're going to use pkgsrc, you may as well track -current.
    > The online manual by F. Lupi does an excellent job of telling
    > how to do this.

At the office I have access to the Internet via DSL.  At home I only
have an analog phone line and a dial-up service that wouldn't maintain
a connection long enough for CVS to be an option.  I was able to down-
load pkgsrc at the office and carry it home on a Zip disk.  The
dial-up connection stays up long enough to fetch the packages I want.

I think it was Lupi's NetBSD Guide that got me started with pkgsrc. It
certainly is much easier than installing binary packages and trying to
satisfy dependencies manually (which I was doing before).

  AR> I run it in a script nightly, but that's probably too often for
    > how often I actually build packages. Weekly is probably better.

I think I must have grabbed the wrong one from somewhere.  Before
leaving the office this evening I downloaded pkgsrc.tar.gz from
/pub/NetBSD/packages/ on ftp.netbsd.org.  It looks as though it's a
link to /pub/NetBSD/NetBSD-current/tar_files/pkgsrc.tar.gz, so
hopefully it's up to date.  It certainly seems to work better than the
last one I tried.

Thinking about that link, it would explain why the one I just
downloaded was apparently dated 2001-05-07: I'm guessing that's when
the link was created. The file it points to is stamped "Feb 23", which
I imagine means 2002-02-23.  Looking at the size and date stamp, I
think the one I had trouble with probably came from
/pub/NetBSD/NetBSD-1.5.2/source/sets/pkgsrc.tgz

If Carlos' problem had the same cause as mine, I'd recommend removing
any packages installed from the older pkgsrc (as these can get in the
way of builds from the new one).  I knocked up a quick shell script to
purge all my installed packages.

Regards,
  - Andy Ball.