Further to this, Jeremy Reed helped me with debug and two outcomes might 
be relevant for pkgsrc on RedHat/Fedora

1) the base /bin/sh -> bash doesn't grok configure stuff.

if you run bmake as SH=/bin/ksh bmake... this problem goes away.

Is there some simple way to make the /bin/ksh *be* the default shell in 
either the pkgsrc/mk/ or in /etc/mk.conf?

2) gnu sort cannot handle +n form arguments unless told to use an
older POSIX environment.

This is also fixable by setting a runtime environment call before the 
exec of bmake. Therefore the same question: can/should these be set by 
some env, or mk/mk.conf settings on the platform?

I've since found that the gcc version is 4.1.1, and there are lvalue 
cast related problems which are well understood, and indeed fixed on 
some code, I may have a patch from gentoo which addresses this for nvi 
I'd like to submit into pkgsrc. Interestingly, the NetBSD gcc doesn't 
trip over this problem, I guess people realized that ANSI C fascism had 
a downside and provided some way out of the problem

Many thanks to Jeremy Reed for his help.

-george

PS I run BSD, but I sometimes have to work on non-BSD boxen, which is 
why It matters to me that pkgsrc works on them. Go pkgsrc for being as
amazingly portable as it is!! as fixes go, setting env is *trivial*.