giriu I wonder if there are any caveats to using pkgsrc instead ;
It highly depends on your expectations; pkgsrc on OpenBSD is known to have active users (posting on the mailing lists), but is not actively maintained (hence, unlike NetBSD, SunOS, macOS and Linux), except for sparse fixes. There could be smaller quirks and adjustments to make depending on the case (some glue, some conditionals, some patching), but it should be definitely usable. On the plus side your contribution would be all the more valuable. If you're ok with taking the orange pill, why not!
Have a look at:
reasons might be allowing more freedom to play with source tarballs, allowing extra features or just being able to use a package missing in OpenBSD ports or just for the love of pkgsrc ...
These all sound like good reasons to me. Once grasped the basics, you could have an unprivileged bootstrap on a separated prefix, maybe a chroot or a vmd guest.
pkgsrc provides a wonderful infrastructure for managing software in a standardized, portable and reproducible way.
I find most interesting to skim through the .mk wrappers found in pkgsrc/mk which are responsible for most of the abstraction found in pkgsrc Makefile.
