My system is netbsd-10. It was installed around 2003 and has been updated since then, both to each NetBSD stable branch, and to new disks usually via dump/restore and sometimes rsync. Other than the problem I am describing in this message, occasional hangs that I blame on ZFS, and X display glitches, it is working well.
I have logged in to ttyE0, and ran "xinit .xsession" which starts xfce4 and I am in an xterm with tmux. I had recently noticed that my system did not have /dev/pts, so I grabbed the line from /etc/fstab on a more recenntly-installed system. I then removed the /dev/ttyp* type entries. This messed up tmux but logging out and starting fresh was ok, and this was not surprising. Now the system is apparently ok execpt for sudo/pkgsrc. I have for a long time had in mk.conf: SU_CMD=sudo /bin/sh -c and "make replace" has invoked sudo, with sudo respecting the don't-ask-for-password timer as documented. Recently this stopped working. After a lot of investigating including writing a quick read/printf program to examine the sudo timestamp files, the problem appears to be that the timestamp records are "TS_PPID" rather than "TS_TTY". The parent is something deep in make, and thus different every time. So this is not really a pkgsrc issue. I have added: Defaults timestamp_type=tty Has anyone else seen sudo refusing to use tty as a timestamp type? sudoers(5) excerpt: timestamp_type sudoers uses per-user time stamp files for credential caching. The timestamp_type option can be used to specify the type of time stamp record used. It has the following possible values: global A single time stamp record is used for all of a user's login sessions, regardless of the terminal or parent process ID. An additional record is used to serialize password prompts when sudo is used multiple times in a pipeline, but this does not affect authentication. ppid A single time stamp record is used for all processes with the same parent process ID (usually the shell). Commands run from the same shell (or other common parent process) will not require a password for timestamp_timeout minutes (5 by default). Commands run via sudo with a different parent process ID, for example from a shell script, will be authenticated separately. tty One time stamp record is used for each terminal, which means that a user's login sessions are authenticated separately. If no terminal is present, the behavior is the same as ppid. Commands run from the same terminal will not require a password for timestamp_timeout minutes (5 by default). kernel The time stamp is stored in the kernel as an attribute of the terminal device. If no terminal is present, the behavior is the same as ppid. Negative timestamp_timeout values are not supported and positive values are limited to a maximum of 60 minutes. This is currently only supported on OpenBSD. The default value is tty. This setting is only supported by version 1.8.21 or higher.