Richard Rauch wrote:

[pkgsrc source build benefits]

I'm not suggesting that you should stick to binary builds.  I also use 
pkgsrc for packages for which I use non-default options, or which are, 
unfortunately, not available as binary packages.  What I'd like, though, 
is an even stronger binary package system, with more attention by the 
developers (of course, that depends on the maintainers' free time). 
Ideally, imho, binary packages would be the standard way of doing things 
(at least for the more common architectures, like i386), and pkgsrc the 
backend for building them, available but optional for the end user.

Pkgsrc is fine and well but I typically have >200 packages on a desktop 
setup, including many that take a long time to build (like firefox, 
thunderbird, gimp) even on today's 3GHz PCs.  It's simply not 
time-economical for me anymore to build everything myself.  It's not 
1995 anymore, where one was satisfied with a handful of 3rd party 
packages on top of the OS.  That's why I'm a big fan of the pkgsrc 
stable branch, and assorted binary package builds, and the relatively 
easy handling of remote package installation via pkg_add and PKG_PATH.

And, of course, you also have to position NetBSD's package mechanism 
against that of other desktop systems, like certain Gnu/Linux 
distributions, which have a very powerful binary package mechanism that 
make it easy to set up a machine with packages really fast (and also 
ease maintenance).

mkb.