Hey, thanks for interesting,

 
> Do you have anything in /etc/mk.conf ?
I don't have that file. Should I ?


> Alternatively, what does PKG_TOOLS_BIN look like in your
> pkgsrc/mk/defs.NetBSD.mk or environment?
 
> My systems have
> PKG_TOOLS_BIN?= /usr/sbin

I have the following in /usr/pkgsrc/mk/defs.NetBSD.mk

NOLOGIN?=               /sbin/nologin
PKG_TOOLS_BIN?=         /usr/sbin

> which doesn't have an "unclosed variable specification" as far as I can
> tell.
it's quite similar to yours I would say ;)

I have nothing about pkgsrc defined in the environment except PATH
/usr/pkg/bin

what also trikes me is the different behaviour between logging in as root..
and loggin in as the (only) user and making su. I did not customize anythyng
yet, I just made useradd and i'm ussing the same csh for both.

I hoped there was a "pkg_install" binary to work around but as I feared
there isn't...

Does maybe "make" or some other core components changed since the ISO
release of 1.6 ? maybe it gets somewhere a wrong syntax.

-ric