On Sat, 3 Jul 2004 09:34:05 +0200
Jochen Kunz <jkunz@unixag-kl.fh-kl.de> wrote:

> I am building under IRIX and some of your problems sound common to mine.
> A good way to make things easier is to install the usual GNU stuff (GCC,
> gawk, bash, ...) in a directory and make this the first component in
> your $PATH when building NetBSD. You may also need some tricks like
> linking .../bin/gcc to .../bin/cc and .../bin/bash to .../bin/sh. (The
> later is usefull for your 1. problem.)

Well, I think it should not be necessary to aggressively convert a
Tru64, IRIX, AIX, or whatever system into a gn00box to compile the
netbsd toolchain.

One approach would be to completely avoid gnuisms in the shell/awk/C/C++
code inside the whole toolchain that can lead to a breakage. Another
approach could be to create an additional layer of compatibility,
something like a bootstrap which provides the GNU toolkit necessary
to build the toolchain inside the separated netbsd build tree, so that
one does not have to install half of ftp.gnu.org on a real UNIX system
by hand, and especially not have to replace the system wide shells or
a system wide commercial C/C++ package with gcc via symlinks or
anything like that.

I think for those who maintain the toolchain it probably would not
be all that hard to take either approach, and this would lead to a
considerably higher number of systems where NetBSD can be compiled,
in my opinion it would certainly be worth the effort.

Regards,

Szabolcs Rumi