On Mon, Mar 05, 2001 at 02:54:05AM -0500, manish jain wrote:
> I have just downloaded the source code of netbsd 1.5. Presently I am
> running linux 2.2.14 on my machine.
> Since linux is the only running environment I have, I tried
> compiling/building netbsd in that environment ( gnu make version 3.78 and
> gcc version 2.91 ).

NetBSD Makefiles won't work with Gnu make; they require real (BSD)
make.

> when I try to execute 'make obj', it fails reporting the following error
> message.
> Makefile:39: *** missing separator.  Stop.
> 
> Line 39 in makefile is the first lines after comments :-
> .include <bsd.own.mk>
> 
> I am not sure but it seems that error message is due to . before the
> include.

That's partly because gmake doesn't implement the same include
methods as BSD make and partly because you haven't got bsd.own.mk in
the standard place on your system (there's a flag you could give to
BSD make to make it look in the source tree for this, but that's
pretty irrelevant since you don't have BSD make anyway and will have
go to a fair length to get it to installed on Linux without breaking
Linux's presumption of make == gmake).

From make(1):

INCLUDE STATEMENTS, CONDITIONALS AND FOR LOOPS
     Makefile inclusion, conditional structures and for loops
     reminiscent of the C programming language are provided in
     make.  All such structures are identified by a line beginning
     with a single dot (`.') character.  Files are included with
     either .include <file> or .include "file".
[...]
     For compatibility with other versions of make `include file
     ...' is also accepted.  If the include statement is written
     as .-include or as .sinclude then er- rors locating and/or
     opening include files are ignored.

> I would appreciate if some one could share information with me on how to
> proceed with build of NetBSD ?

Your life will be much simpler if you install from a snapshot
(or just from the tarballs in--presuming i386, here--
ftp.netbsd.org/pub/NetBSD/NetBSD-1.5/i386/binary/sets/ if all you
want is 1.5, as opposed to -current). Trust me.

If you must cross-compile, go read
http://www.netbsd.org/Documentation/cross/ to help you get a
workable environment for doing so. But it's going to be a bitch, if
even possible, to get this set up within Linux.

       ~ g r @ eclipsed.net