> This goes alot further but eventually ends with errors!  Anybody successful at
> building netbsd from source?

Sure, all the time ... though, it might depend what kind of source your're 
trying to compile. On all the stable and good shape machines no problems.
I have one machine which contains some crapped hardware and
so i receive the message "internal compiler error" sometimes.
Nothing wrong with the source, just with my hardware in my case.

If you downloaded the most current source ... well, it can occur
that some stuff perhaps wont compile.
If you download the netbsd-1-4 or netbsd-1-5 source it'll compile
fine, for those are stable branches.

Though some hints when wishing to compile netbsd from source.
- First build a new kernel from the downloaded source
  and reboot netbsd using that kernel.
- in /usr/src do: "find . - type l -name obj | xargs rm"
  which basically searches the entire source tree for any existing
  object links and removes them.
- Do "make cleandir" after.
- Now check that /usr/obj exists and do "make obj"
- Last step: "make build" :-)

Though it'll always be a good idea to read the comments in the Makefile
of /usr/src.
Good luck building netbsd.
Bye,

Mipam.