I've searched the archives and the rest of the NetBSD web site for the answer 
to this.  All I can find is a proposal for a.out-to-ELF migration, some little 
discussion that seems to end in February '00, and a How-To that assumes that 
I'm upgrading from source code.

How to I tell my -current box to use the a.out legacy libraries?  I have 
COMPAT_AOUT in my kernel.

I tried to start emacs and it complained about an a.out termcap or some such, 
so I uninstalled emacs and tried to rebuild it in pkgsrc only to discover that 
gmake no longer runs because of some a.out lib.