>Since MACHINE_ARCH is determined at compile-time for bmake, we can
>choose to either change it right then, or compile in the specific
>version and override it in bsd.prefs.mk.  If nobody can think of a
>reason why we'd want to keep it in the binary, I think we should change
>it there (as attached).

This is already done, bmake-3.1.15 has:

machine=`uname -p 2>/dev/null || uname -m`

case "$machine" in
unknown)
        machine=`uname -m`
        ;;
esac

and

Linux)
        case "$machine" in
	i?86) MACHINE_ARCH=i386;;# does anyone really care about 686 vs 586?
	esac
        ;;
esac

which is functionally equivalent to your patch but more efficient.

What version of bmake are you looking at?

Thanks
--sjg