Ummm... Yes, this could be better documented. 

I myself don't have *too* much trouble building.

DESTDIR does more than set where the target builds go, it also
does install includes and libraries. It doesn't do everything,
and it varies from  architecture to architecture (due to some
shared library foo). However, some stuff still gets done out of
the running system, in particular the /usr/share/mk stuff- I'm
sure someone cleverer than I with NetBSD already works around this.

I build both -current and the 1.3 tree every night under the alpha
architecture, although upon checking, they haven't built all the way
through for me in a while (they did at one point). These problems
are eminently fixable. However, they do *not* trash my current
running system. Included below is the script I use to do this.

Are you starting from vanilla 1.3? If so, which platform?


-matt
#!/bin/sh
#
PATH=.:/usr/local/bin:/etc:/bin:/usr/bin:/usr/local/sbin:/sbin:/usr/sbin
# foo due to some .mk wierdness
RLIST="usr.bin/man/man usr.bin/ktrace/ktrace usr.sbin/mrouted/mrouted \
	gnu/usr.bin/gdb/gdb"
SDIR=${SDIR-/space}
cd ${SDIR}

for release in 1.3 current
do
	cd NetBSD-${release}/src
	rm -f $RLIST
	(make DESTDIR=${SDIR}/NetBSD-${release}/proto beforeinstall build) > \
		${SDIR}/buildlog-${release} 2>&1 &
	cd ${SDIR}
done
wait