After having given an old pensioned DS3100 a new life by installing
NetBSD on it, I completed the installation by sup'ing current (i.e.
1.2_BETA) sources and rebuilding everything.

Well I didn't in fact rebuild everything as several of the binary file
utilities were not installed. 

This leads to the following questions:

1. Why is /usr/src/usr.bin/ar not installed on the pmax. At the first
glance I see no reason that it should not be usable. My guess is that the
ar binary that I got as part of the snapshot is in fact gnu's ar. In fact
there is a behavioural difference between BSD's ar and gnu's in that the
BSD version rewrites the original file, while gnu's ar creates a new file. 

2. I have tried to install gnu binutils 2.6, and after several attempts,
I got it to compile cleanly with
     ./configure mips-dec-netbsd1.2. --without-shared 
and installing with gmake instead of make.
Is the ln, as, nm, size, etc. in the snapshot in fact just taken from 
the un-modified binutils 2.6 package ?

regards
Erik Bertelsen