Quoting Jeremy C. Reed (reed@reedmedia.net):
> On Mon, 15 Dec 2003, Chuck Yerkes wrote:
> 
> > I'm fairly well used to OpenBSD and one thing they do that's
> > nice is that BEFORE the install target is a "package" target.
> > Always.
> 
> OpenBSD ports developers made sure that each package (port) used
> "install" to install and then it could force it to install to the
> fake-install directory first. (Last I read, OpenBSD wasn't finished
> getting all packages to do the fake install first.)

(and I've not run into things that don't to the fake-install
yet, but I'm not using much X11 or truly obtuse ports.  But's
it's been quite a while that it's been working).

> pkgsrc could do the same, but it could involve a lot of patches to make
> sure it uses the install we want, to make sure packages don't use "cp",
> etc. (Last week, I did notice several packages were fixed to use the
> correct install(1).)

> >     "show me the chain of dependancies for spamassassin"
> 
> I use show-all-depends-dirs (but that doesn't show versions and it also
> includes the BUILD_DEPENDS) or show-depends-dirs.
> 
> By the way, I like using the bin-install target.

Thanks for all the good answers people.

Seems that's it's not all random bits by infinite monkeys ;)