Hey, I regret that epoll was committed without further discussion with pkgsrc developers. We have a lot of experience with this already (illumos/SmartOS exposes a compatibility epoll) and the situation is not entirely great and requires lots of workarounds.
Mostly, the situation of having epoll freely usable in public headers but discouraged in the man pages doesn't really work. Either we have barriers against its use, or we encourage its use. Software is mostly tested on Linux and FreeBSD, which have either epoll or kqueue. Build systems will detect epoll and use it. Autotools is falling out of favour, so it is getting harder and harder to override the detection of operating system functions. Build systems need to be patched. I don't want pkgsrc to be full of "don't use epoll on NetBSD" workaronds. I think the compatibility support should be opt-in.
