>1) Are there any ports of Emacs, Pine, and Samba?

There's an Emacs, but it doesnt unexec, and the pepole who built the
NetBSD package still cant understand that their `integration' broke
unexec'ed emacs.  Plus it takes ~60 secs to start up.

I dont' use Pine or Samba, so I dont know.  If they run on other
NetBSD platforms, and they dont involve hairy tricks like saving the
modified data space of a running program back into the binary, they
should probably Just Work on NetBSD/pmax.


>2) What are the feeling towards other OS's? I've come to the
>rationalization that each OS has it's purpose and things that it's good
>for. In my house alone,  there are 6 different OS's running (if you include
>the different versions of windows and linux)

Well, if you want them, more power to you.  Alternate OSes for Mips or
DECstation hardware are hard to find, and the people working on
NetBSD/pmax quite understandably dont seem specially motivated to work
on other OSes.


>3) How does the porting process in general work from the 'official' version
>to pmax? Is it a strict they do something first and then we port it? The
>reason I ask is that I'm not too fond of the way the installation process
>works for packages.

Sorry, I dont quite understand this one....


>4) Is there a cross-compiler in existence for compiling pmax binaries on a
>i386 linux machine? Is that possible?

Yes, but you'd have to re-integrate the NetBSD config and bugfixes
into an FSF release of GCC, and also build binutils 2.8.1 as
cross-development tools.

>5) Why does pmax still use X11R5? Is there something that's kept a port of
>R6?

yes, the hideously big and complicated API that's used in ULtrix 4.2
and X11R6, versus the older uglier API used in 4.3BSD-Tahoe and later.

> Not that I know the differences between them, I just don't like the
>hack of running a daemon to access the fonts.

Why not uncompress the fonts and rerun mkfontdir?
Remember, it's only the Xserver that's R5.


>6) What was the other question I wanted to ask?

Where to send me the checks?? ;)