At 20:41 Uhr -0400 10.10.2006, gabriel rosenkoetter wrote:

[building packages on NetBSD/mac68k]

>Have you no more modern/faster processor hardware you can use even
>temporarily to cross-build some mac68k packages as you need them?
>I mean, even one of those $300 PCs from Walmart would chew through
>this pretty quickly... and with a bit of effort you could do the
>entire build environment on a bootable CD.

Erm.

This is kind of a slippery slope.

Once you start sliding away from mac68k hardware... NetBSD/i386 zips 
by... FreeBSD... why not Debian Linux instead... Redhat Linux... 
Nürnberger Windo^W^WSuse Linux... and when you reach the bottom of 
the slope, the thing you hit with a _thump_ is a Dell "Intel Inside" 
box running Windows XP. Welcome to Internet Explorer.

Meaning, there is always a seemingly easier way, and why bother with 
this Unixy stuff at all, when there's a world full of redymade 
software on the OS from Redmond (which everybody else uses, anyway)?

>Waiting for GCC on a mac68k, never mind having disks of a relevant
>speed and size just seems... painful to me, though the computer
>itself is absolutely still reasonable for other applications that
>need less I/O or processor most of the time.

Looking at a typical pkgsrc build on a Mac, much time is spent 
working through layers and layers of pkgsrc wrappered 
wrapper-wrapped-scripts and Makefiles calling Makefiles calling... 
you get the drift. At the bottom end is a GNU configure script that 
works out time and again with glacial speed volatile information like 
the return type of printf, and the size of 'int'.

I suspect there is not that much time to be saved by exporting (takes 
time, too) the compiler jobs. OTOH, the fifteen minutes that -current 
gcc 4 needed _per_file_ on my Quadra 650 when building devel/ddd were 
truly impressive...

>Actually... what's the Application here? I can't imagine that using
>X can be all that... fun of a process on a mac68k, relative to
>fairly inexpensively-available more recent hardware.

The problem here is that a machine which is not self-hosted has no 
show-case for its use anymore - I'll leave out embedded hardware, for 
obvious reasons. This is actually a downside of NetBSD being 
cross-buildable: It increases the risks of carrying bugs over several 
releases, simply because per definition there is no MD showstopper 
bug anymore, the distribution can always be built elsewhere.

>I'm all for making good use of hardware, and mac68k systems are
>certainly only wrongly considered junk, but... I'm not sure doing
>anything GUI is their place.

What is "anything GUI" here? My Quadra 700 has run icewm, xemacs 
(gnuclient is your friend), a load of xterms and other gimmicks for 
many years. I suppose, you could add Dillo, if you wanted. The 
Motif-based DDD was actually very nice, until gdb got borken; I used 
it for remote kernel debugging.

Some might consider the fact that it wouldn't run KDE a feature.  =8>

	hauke

-- 
"It's never straight up and down"     (DEVO)