On Sat, Jul 03, 2004 at 09:54:55PM +0200, Rumi Szabolcs wrote:
> On Sat, 3 Jul 2004 09:34:05 +0200
> Jochen Kunz <jkunz@unixag-kl.fh-kl.de> wrote:
> 
> > I am building under IRIX and some of your problems sound common to mine.
> > A good way to make things easier is to install the usual GNU stuff (GCC,
> > gawk, bash, ...) in a directory and make this the first component in
> > your $PATH when building NetBSD. You may also need some tricks like
> > linking .../bin/gcc to .../bin/cc and .../bin/bash to .../bin/sh. (The
> > later is usefull for your 1. problem.)
> 
> Well, I think it should not be necessary to aggressively convert a
> Tru64, IRIX, AIX, or whatever system into a gn00box to compile the
> netbsd toolchain.
> 
> One approach would be to completely avoid gnuisms in the shell/awk/C/C++
> code inside the whole toolchain that can lead to a breakage. Another
> approach could be to create an additional layer of compatibility,
> something like a bootstrap which provides the GNU toolkit necessary
> to build the toolchain inside the separated netbsd build tree, so that
> one does not have to install half of ftp.gnu.org on a real UNIX system
> by hand, and especially not have to replace the system wide shells or
> a system wide commercial C/C++ package with gcc via symlinks or
> anything like that.

In general this isn't needed. However your host system must be something
close to POSIX compliant. For instance on Solaris, simply putting /usr/xpg4/bin
in your PATH first is generally enough to make a working build. I've certainly
cross built from systems without gnu AWK, bash, etc. The only real annoying
part is requiring zlib to be installed but that'll get fixed eventually to
use the one in-tree.

However, if your host system is still in the 80's tools wise then yes, you're
gonna lose and need to install/use POSIX compliant tools.

James