The non-writability check for DISTDIR is intended to prevent wasting resources when fetchers wouldn't be able to save what they download. On my build farm with pkgsrc (and pkgsrc/distfiles) mounted over NFS, however, the check gives false positives for NetBSD 9.2 and -current. Downgrade it to a warning so that these fetches can succeed, while leaving a breadcrumb in case someone encounters a true positive. It would of course be interesting to sort out why, in my environment, a wide variety of other OSes get 1 for "${TEST} ! -w $fetchdir" while NetBSD gets 0. In the meantime, joerg@ suggested this workaround and gdt@ agrees it's reasonable to try.

(schmonz)

@@ -1,6 +1,6 @@
 #!/bin/sh
 #
-# $NetBSD: fetch,v 1.20 2020/08/27 11:45:45 jperkin Exp $
+# $NetBSD: fetch,v 1.21 2021/12/16 14:10:46 schmonz Exp $
 #
 # Copyright (c) 2006, 2015 The NetBSD Foundation, Inc.
 # All rights reserved.
@@ -228,10 +228,8 @@
 fi
 
 ${TEST} -d $fetchdir || ${MKDIR} -p $fetchdir 2>/dev/null
-if ${TEST} ! -w $fetchdir; then
-	${ECHO} 1>&2 "$self: Cannot write to `cd $fetchdir && pwd`"
-	exit 1
-fi
+
+${TEST} -w $fetchdir || ${ECHO} 1>&2 "$self: WARNING: DISTDIR `cd $fetchdir && pwd` looks non-writable."
 
 # Set the name of the output file.  In the "resume" case, we initialize
 # the fetch loop by ensuring that the temporary output file already