I look in "man etcupdate" and see nothing that supports updating /etc on a different partition.
I want to rebuild NetBSD-current for both amd64 and i386, from amd64. Both installations are on 16 GB USB sticks with GPT partitioning. i386 installation gives me a spew of green messages about problems reading the USB stick, so much that I can't do anything worthwhile without being interrupted by that spew. Maybe NetBSD-current i386 is not stable, or not stable on that USB stick; I notice /etc/rc.conf sometimes getting messed up. So I would like to make one more update attempt, and if that is not satisfactory, install to a different model of 16 GB USB stick. For i386, I would install both kernel and userland from amd64 rather than reboot after copying the kernel and before installing the userland: nothing to lose on such a shaky system. Possibly NetBSD-current i386 could be allergic to this particular Kingston Data Traveler model? Could I then run etcupdate? Maybe reboot into the NetBSD-current i386 USB stick, and if the green spew gets in the way of etcupdate, give up on that USB stick in favor of another? Maybe, since I have no packages built on NetBSD-current i386, I do better to just install fresh on another USB stick. Make (build.sh) release instead of distribution, and be sure to have sufficient /dev/dk* nodes? Tom