changing from pkgbase to regularbase

Hi,

A newly installed system was installed with pkgbase
It was then upgraded via source with git.
This is very recent 16:current amd64.

When it came to installkernel, it was suggested to
set env DESTDIR=/ which was done and then
installkernel proceeded normally.
The same thing with installworld.

My question is this: does this need to be done every time
from now on, or does some setting/tunable need to be
modified somewhere to properly un-pkgbase things?

--