Michael wrote:

> and then from /usr
> cvs checkout pkgsrc
> and have a cup of tea. Or two. Probably three, depending on your internet
> connectivity, downloading pkgsrc will take some time.

You can speed this up by downloading the (weekly updated) file
  ftp://ftp.NetBSD.org/pub/NetBSD/packages/pkgsrc.tar.gz
extracting the files and then updating this tree.

> After that put something to set CVSROOT into your shell startup script
> ( .profile, .cshrc, whatever you're using ), add /usr/pkg/bin to your
> path and you're ready to go. You only need to do the login part once.
> To update pkgsrc just do
> cd /usr/pkgsrc
> cvs update -dPA

Isn't /usr/pkg/bin part of the default PATH on NetBSD?
IMHO, setting CVSROOT should be unnecessary because everything "cvs"
needs to know is recorded in the various CVS/ directories in the
/usr/pkgsrc tree.

Interesting links for beginners:

  http://netbsd.mirrors.treibsand.com/Documentation/software/packages.html
  http://netbsd.mirrors.treibsand.com/Documentation/pkgsrc/

> btw. do NOT mix up binary packages and stuff compiled with pkgsrc.
> unset PKG_PATH when using pkgsrc or weird things may happen.

This is the first time I hear about such problems and I could not find
any problem reports in the database at
  http://www.de.netbsd.org/Misc/query-pr.html 

Would you care to elaborate on that, maybe on tech-pkg@?

ciao
     Klaus