On Sun, 8 Oct 2000, Olaf Seibert wrote:

: AFAIK many people have expressed the opinion before that it is highly
: desirable to be able to "just build" the world, without installing
: anything in the host system.

There's often interdependencies with libc, source generation tools (rpcgen),
the binutils, and gcc that necessitate either a complete cross toolchain, or
an updated toolchain on the host.  If you want to build entirely within a
$DESTDIR, what you want is a *chroot* to the $DESTDIR and a base build
there.  Otherwise, you need an updated toolchain (cross-compiler or in the
host system).

: mention just one thing: installing new header files or shared libraries
: makes it impossible or difficult to build any software that will run on
: an older, released system.

Once I have the cross packages fixed up a bit, this will no longer be the
case.  In about a month, there should be cross-*-netbsd packages available
for building binaries to as far back as NetBSD 1.1 (with presupplied headers
and libraries to do so).

The target here is to be able to build the binutils/gcc toolchain by hand
with "./configure" and throw it somewhere under /usr/local, or to use a
cross toolchain pkg to build for a previous release.

-- 
-- Todd Vierling <tv@wasabisystems.com>  *  http://www.wasabisystems.com/
-- Speed, stability, security, and support.  Wasabi NetBSD:  Run with it.