Excerpts from internet.computing.netbsd.port-pmax: 25-Aug-101 package
woes (was Re: ultri.. by Bob Lantz@Stanford.EDU 
> > The current Mozilla just needs some minor tweaking to work on MIPS
> > (some machine-dependent threads stuff for the internal threads
> > package it has).
>  
> It would be nice to have a modern web browser! Of course,
> Mozilla/Netscape6 is slow on my Powerbook, so I don't think it will be
> screaming on the pmax...

Before the end of last semester, I attempted to build it for the last
time on my /260.  Recent versions actually compile without major hacks
to the build scripts (linking shared and static libraries are still
somewhat buggy at points in the build, but definitely not as much as
earlier milestone releases).

A mozilla binary would be built, but you need to hack a dlopen() call
where mozilla tests whether dlopen() really works (by passing in 0 as
the library name).  On NetBSD/pmax, the C library returns a non-NULL
handle and then mozilla promptly dumps core when you do a dlclose() on
that handle.  That's easy to work around. (I put in a NetBSD bug report
for that almost a year ago and it's still open.)

However, it seems like the GNU pth library (at least in NetBSD 1.4.2) is
broken enough that mozilla can register some modules, but then quickly
die after attempting to get and release locks.  I don't know if the
problem was with my copy of pth or not and I don't plan to power up the
/260 any time soon, but that's my experience.  

Plan for at least 24 hours of straight compiling and a couple gigs of
free space to do the build.  I did it over NFS, since my pmax is low on
disk.  I think the build bombed somewhere in the middle and needed a
little makefile tweak, so you probably want to monitor it, too.

Cheers,

JCSmolens

  /--------------------------------------------------------------\
 | Jared C. Smolens           Electrical and Computer Engineering |
 | www.rabidpenguin.org                Carnegie Mellon University |
 | jsmolens+@andrew.cmu.edu                        Pittsburgh, PA |
  \--------------------------------------------------------------/