3.x end of life

[Paul Mather <paul%gromit.dlib.vt.edu@localhost>]

Having recently received a notice via netbsd-announce declaring 3.x is  
now end of life, I guess the time has come to upgrade my DEC 1000A  
netbsd-3 install to something that is still supported.  My preference  
is to upgrade to 5.x, but I have some questions:

1) I vaguely remember some mention that the move to GCC 4.x in NetBSD  
4 onwards yielded some problems building a complete distribution on  
alpha due to GCC 4.x being more "memory hungry" than 3.x.  I have only  
128 MB of RAM in my DEC 1000A and 256 MB of swap space.  Will this be  
sufficient to build a NetBSD 4.x or 5.x world natively?  How much swap  
space need I add to build netbsd-5 successfully?

2) The NetBSD install on this machine dates back quite some way (to  
some 1.x version; I forget exactly which).  Anyway, it originated in  
an era where disks were a lot smaller than they are today.   
Accordingly, my partitions are smaller than would be common on  
contemporary sized drives.  I'm worried that if the standard NetBSD  
4.x or 5.x install is larger than 3.x that my root partition may not  
be large enough.  Does anyone know how much 4.x or 5.x differs in size  
relative to netbsd-3?  Here is what I have currently (which is ample  
space for 3.x):

Filesystem    Size      Used     Avail Capacity  Mounted on
/dev/raid0a   126M      44M       75M    37%    /
/dev/raid2a   126M      55M       65M    45%    /var
/dev/raid2d   1.5G     957M      514M    65%    /usr
/dev/raid3a   3.9G     1.5G      2.2G    40%    /home
/dev/sd1a     1.9G     256M      1.6G    13%    /usr/pkgsrc
/dev/sd1d     1.9G     1.0G      815M    56%    /usr/src
/dev/sd3d     2.2G     790M      1.3G    36%    /usr/obj

(I also have a 4.3G drive I can use as a temporary build area.)

As you can see, the system is set up with much of it configured as  
either RAID-1 or RAID-5 under RAIDframe.  I'd hate to have to re- 
partition with larger partitions because I'd likely lose that ability  
given the physical drives in there.  BTW, the system's only production  
role is as a slave nameserver and so doesn't need much in the way of  
future expansion: just enough to contain the base OS, really.

3) Is it possible to upgrade successfully directly from netbsd-3 to  
netbsd-5?  Or, do you have to upgrade to some version of 4.x as an  
interim step?  Does anyone have any recommended path they have tried  
that has been successful?  (Right now, it is running netbsd-3.)  I  
have limited physical access to this system, so I hope not to have to  
spend much, if any, time in single user mode if I can help it.

Any advice, gotchas, or hints from personal upgrade experiences are  
gratefully appreciated.

Cheers,

Paul.