Re: building userland with a netbooted system

[Mouse <mouse%Rodents-Montreal.ORG@localhost>]

>> /usr/src/../tools/bin/powerpc--netbsd-ar cq libedit_pic.a [...]
>> nbmake: don't know how to make nbmake:. Stop

My diskless build completed successfully; my diskful build stopped with
this error at a slightly different place (running ranlib on
libedit_pic.a).  The diskful build was done from the same boot as the
diskless build; I just mounted the disk and chrooted into it, since the
kernel I would have used was the same.  (What I did actually increased
the similarity of the two builds, not decreased, and thus makes the
different behaviour even more surprising.)

On investigation, I found some very odd messages at the beginning of
the failed build log about /dev/null.  On investigation, /dev/null
turned out to be a plain file, not character device (2,2), so it's no
wonder various things broke - something redirects to /dev/null and the
resulting "discarded" data is there to surprise the next thing that
takes input from /dev/null....

It might be worth checking to see if this somehow happened to your
setup, especially if your build log begins with stuff like

===> MACHINE:          macppc
===> MACHINE_ARCH:     powerpc
===> Build platform:   NetBSD 5.2 macppc
===> HOST_SH:          /bin/sh
make: "/dev/null" line 1: Need an operator
make: Fatal errors encountered -- cannot continue
make: "/usr/src/share/mk/bsd.own.mk" line 100: warning: "cd /usr/src && 
/usr/bin/make -r -V .OBJDIR -f /dev/null xxx" returned non-zero status
===> No make: stopped in /usr/src/tooldir.NetBSD-5.2-macppc/bin/nbmake, needs 
building.
===> Bootstrapping nbmake
configure: loading cache /dev/null
/dev/null: /usr/src/tools/make/configure:: not found
checking for sh... /bin/sh
checking for gcc... cc

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