Crossing the Stream; pkgsrc and Linux Contrarianism

For the last month the Linux world has been in an uproar about IBM Redhat changing CentOS from a RHEL clone to a RHEL beta. 

We have forks and everything -personally speaking, my money is on this one.

In response Redhat's expanded their developer's program -but that's not really interesting to me. At least not at the moment. I've been sitting on a Redhat Developer account since 2015 or 2016 (when they made it free) but I've never really been thrilled with Redhat -going back to when I bought 5.2 in 1998.

But for some reason I'm uncertain about, I'm interested in seeing if I can use pkgsrc on top of Centos/Streams. 

I'm not sure why, except I like the idea of providing a one-and-done newish platform on top of Centos -which, with streams, honestly won't be terribly different than Ubuntu Server (in terms of stability). I also see it in an odd (and possibly incorrect) hedge against low-level breakage on Streams. 

I'm on my 2nd day of building on here and have already worked some things out:

I've learned that post-install I need to add the ncurses-devel and gcc-c++ packages. 

For libcups/cups to compile I've made the following changes to /usr/pkgsrc/share/mk/platform/Linux.mk

[random@deadrat-localdomain ~]$ cat /usr/pkgsrc/mk/platform/Linux.mk |grep ULI

ULIMIT_CMD_datasize?=   /usr/bin/ulimit -d `/usr/bin/ulimit -H -d`

ULIMIT_CMD_stacksize?=  /usr/bin/ulimit -s `/usr/bin/ulimit -H -s`

ULIMIT_CMD_memorysize?= /usr/bin/ulimit -m `/usr/bin/ulimit -H -m`

ULIMIT_CMD_cputime?=    /usr/bin/ulimit -t `/usr/bin/ulimit -H -t`

Then I build (in order): ncurses, gcc10, clang, python27, python38, python39, flex,bison, gdb, screen,sudo,fonts/harfbuzz 

Doing it randomly seems to cause fonts/harfbuzz to break. 

People complain that RHEL/Centos' packages etc are too old, but that might actually be a mark in their favor when it comes to pkgsrc. At least, I haven't gotten this far before on Debian, Ubuntu or Fedora.

Which makes me nervous for when I try to build this on one of those -I suspect their systems may well be too new.