Paul A Vixie writes:
> rather than waiting 5 to 10 days, why not build on a faster machine
> with gcc in its cross compilation mode?  or has nobody worked on ld
> and as for cross compiles to the vax?

First of all, it's more fun watching the vax building its own NetBSD.
It gives me a feeling of doing somthing useful with my vax :-)

At least on NetBSD/i386 it's almost no problem to setup a environment
for cross compilation. I've used such a setup from the time before 
installable binaries were available till some months ago. There are 
(were?) some minor problems with ld (different pagesize, new vs. old 
ZMAGIC format) and ar/ranlib, but in general it's quite easy. With
big-endian machines it's not that easy, there are more/bigger problems.
The speed improvement is really enormous, builds on 486DX2 are 10-20 
times faster than on uvax.

The annoying part of cross compiling is that there are programs where
parts of the sources are built by the Makefile using scripts (sometimes
machine dependent) and small C-programs. Since in the Makefile uses
the same compiler (native or cross) for all compiles, it's a mess.
This holds for additional tools (eg. emacs) but also for tools in the 
NetBSD-tree (eg. sh and/or csh). That and the idea of stressing my vax 
and NetBSD/vax made me switch back to native mode since NetBSD/vax was 
becoming more and more stable on the vax.

Ciao,
	bertram