Thanks for the response, John.
I had asked:
> Does anyone have a clue regarding this happy stuff occurring during
> source make?  I first saw this with the tar files from dec 17(16)
> but am still receiving the errors on attempting to make any binary with 
> the sources from today (12/29).  I can't make a new make or sed, ld, 
> tsort, cc and so on.  

"John F. Woods" <jfw@ksr.com> replied: 
>> The messages from "ar", I think, are the key:  for some reason, sed started
>> double spacing its output at some point (note to Adrian Hall -- the sed in
>> your binary packs that you put up for ftp (thanks again!!) does the same
>> thing!  Recompiling it from recent sources with your libc.a makes it
>> behave.), and this causes the library build process to fail (blank lines
>> blow out join's mind, causing lorder to fail, causing few if any files to
>> appear in libraries; also, I noticed (perhaps with curdled binaries) that
>> nm seems to be reporting a "C" for data objects in PIC files?).  That was
>> also the root of my "sh" problems, as much of the sh build process depends
>> on sed.

>> Check whether or not sed is misbehaving ( sed < /etc/passwd is a quick and
>> easy test); if it is, try rebuilding it with an old copy of the library.
>> Do NOT install the programs you're building unless you saved a copy of my
>> "My unending woes" message from the day before yesterday so you can recycle
>> it :-).

>> Does anyone know why sed started doublespacing output?  Has it really stopped?

Well, my sed is not working.  I appear to be in the situation of "you can't get
there from here".  I've known from the start of my involvment with current that
I was going down a perilous path, no scsi tape and limited disk (approx 300MB),
and shared libs.
The only libc I have is:
-r--r--r--  1 bin  bin  395620 Dec 29 22:36 /usr/lib/libc.a
which is the result of the problematic build... 

>>> Date: Wed, 29 Dec 93 09:20:25 EST
>>> From: jfw@ksr.com (John F. Woods)
>>> Subject: my unending woes...
>>> Can anyone offer a working (statically linked) /usr/bin/tar so I can
>>> back up my system (which barely comes up to multi-user) and reinstall
>>> from scratch?

I don't have anything to restore... Does anyone have any ideas as to how I
might recover short of getting the NetBSD-0.9 binaries, etc. and beginning
all over from there?
 -Tom

Tom Crockett - tmc@netcom.com

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