On, Wed, 3 Sep 1997 11:01:23 -0700
  "Terry R. Friedrichsen" <terry@venus.sunquest.com> writes:


>Well, nobody's sent me mail telling me to stop posting this junk, even
>when I ask stupid questions, so here goes:

No no, keep posting...

The story thus far is that I installed the latest snapshot onto an empty

>1)  there is no ldconfig in src/sbin

Nope. I beleive It's a standard GNU ldconfig.  The source should be
in a tarball on ftp.netbsd.org. If not, let me know and I'll fix it.


>2)  there *is* one in src/gnu/usr.bin/ld/ldconfig; however, it appears to be
>        incomplete and isn't for the pmax anyway, to judge by the Makefile

As Jason points out, this is for an a.out toolchain.  A.out toolchains
just don't work anymore on mips machines, even with static linking.


>3)  however, the "make build" *did* take the trouble to install the GNU
>        ldconfig's man page ldconfig.8; that'd be OK except that the man
>        page doesn't match up with the ldconfig on the snapshot :-)

The general idea is that the man pages should be MI. It doesn't help
that the `standard' NetBSD toolchain is based on a four-year-old
version of what's now GNU binutils.  Many of the `standard' NetBSD
options ar no longer supported by the current (or even 1996) versions
of the GNU toolsuite.  The man pages can't easily reflect both.

(the snapshot toolset is unmodified binutils 2.8.1.)

>4)  finally, the GNU ldconfig Makefile defines BINDIR as /sbin, but the
>        sources are in usr.bin, which seems inconsistent

The a.out ldconfig in the tree is properly configured for an a.out
NetBSD system.  pmaxes are a not-quite-properly-configred ELF system.


>Is there a "to do" list somewhere that I can try to pick a few items off,
>so I can contribute something?

There's a projects or todo list on the pmax www pages.
If finishing porting ld.elf_so isn't on there, it should be.
The kernel  startup mods and  crt0.c already have the required
support; the problem is getting the bootstrap code in ld.elf_so to
work properly. Every time  I try, I get a ld.elf_so that segfaults
before doing anything.

In fact, even recompiling the ld.so that we ship doesn't seem to work(!).