George Georgalis wrote:
> ...oh, so the binary packages need to be built on the same machine
> they run on... I didn't know that.

Not the same *machine*, just the same architecture and operating
system with a compatible release. Of course, you have to refrain from
using compile flags such as --march=athlon if the package is supposed
to run on a Duron, Pentium, i486 etc. As long as you have the
necessary COMPAT_* flags in your NetBSD kernel (GENERIC has them all),
you can also run pretty old binary packages. There are binary
packages available online, you don't necessarily *have* to compile
them yourself.

> I imagine this won't change
> anytime soon/ever because each package owner would have to make
> their package cross-compile-able (at minimum), ugh.

I don't think it would be difficult to make pkgsrc itself
cross-compile-friendly but as you say, individual packages are often
not cross-compilable because they execute compiled test programs or
assume the compile-time environment is identical to the runtime
environment.

> >I guess in this special case (amd64 + i386) you could use Xen
> >with a guest domain running NetBSD/i386.
 
> would like to get up to speed on zen sometime.

The pronunciation is quite different.

-- 
Christian