I found out the hard way that the makefiles for stuff in /sbin do not
indicate that the binaries are to be statically linked.

Is there a makefile for /sbin, and does that makefile set up static linking
for everything below it?

Copying mount from a boot floppy and generic kernel made for a most interesting
evening. :-)

In general, is there any easy path for those who don't have the time or
disk space to compile all sources, yet wish to compile those things that
have bugs?

There is a known bug in man that if MANPATH is set, a command of the form
"man n blah" will ignore the n.  I tried rebuilding man, but that didn't
fix the problem.  Do I need to make changes in man.conf or something?