Hello!

> I am having trouble building ghostscript5 in the package system. It tries
> to apply the NetBSD patches, and fails there.

Can you please provide at least the failure message here?

What does `ident patch-*` in pkgsrc/print/ghostscript5/patches say?

You should find there:

patch-aa:
     $NetBSD: patch-aa,v 1.6 1998/11/12 14:37:14 agc Exp $
patch-ab:
     $NetBSD: patch-ab,v 1.2 1998/08/07 11:11:23 agc Exp $
patch-af:
     $NetBSD: patch-af,v 1.2 1998/11/29 16:34:28 frueauf Exp $
patch-ag:
     $NetBSD: patch-ag,v 1.1 1998/11/04 23:36:49 mycroft Exp $

I just tried a `make extract` followed by `make patch` here, which
worked like expected.

pkgsrc/print/ghostscript5/Makefile should have

Makefile:
     $NetBSD: Makefile,v 1.30 1998/11/29 16:34:27 frueauf Exp $

Greets
-- 
   Name  : Thorsten Frueauf            Milano@irc cri@onaliM       //
   E-Mail: s_frueau@ira.uka.de oder ukfy@rz.uni-karlsruhe.de     \X/