On Mon, 16 Nov 1998 12:39:29 -0800  Alistair Crooks wrote:

> Please note that, since September 1998, the pkgsrc directory hierarchy
> can be mounted read-only. Not that this helps you much, but it might help
> you in the future.

One thing that doesn't seem to work for me (and I can't remember if I
reported it) was that when setting DISTDIR to a read-only directory, it
doesn't look in the LOCAL_PORTS directory (mostly for pkg_install.*)
Obviously you can point DISTDIR at the subdirectory when installing such
packages, but that seems kinda "not right".  Also if you need to fetch a
non-distributable package (eg, ssh), it can't place it in the read-only
directory...

Without knowing if there's a "proper" solution (I've looked a couple of
times through mk/* without seeing anything obvious), it would seem like
a good idea if you could specify multiple directory to look for packages
in, as well as a writable directory to place newly fetched packages.
For example:

	DISTDIRS=	/ftp/pub/NetBSD/packages/distfiles \
			/ftp/pub/GNU \
			/my/local/security/stuff/archive
	LOCALDISTDIR=	/usr/pkgsrc/distfiles

Maybe "LOCALDISTDIR" could be just left as "DISTDIR" for compatibility
with the current setup.

Does all this make sense?

Do you want a PR on this?

Simon.