>pmax people:
>
>I tried to compile emacs and got an error telling me I can not do this due
>to my use of the mips chip.


>What is the story here? and any workarounds?

Emacs loads up lots of precompiled e-lisp. Normally the emacs build
process does the compilation, and starts up an emacs which loads the
compiled e-lisp into its address space and then dumps it  out
into the Emacs binary.  This is called `unexecing.

Emacs doesn't have unexec support that works on NetBSD/mips;
none of the supplied mips support  works with our ELF.

The long-term solution is to get a working unexec.  (This was very
difficult until fairly recently, due to bugs in gdb.)

Until then, the correct solution is to run emacs without
undumping. The distributed Emacs *used* to have support for that, and
it *used* to work (albeit with ~30-40 seconds of load time).

My guess is, some package-maintainer didnt know what they were doing
and ripped out the non-unexec'ed support when they upgraded Emacs.