>I argued once before (probably a couple of years back) that it ought to be 
>possible to rebuild the whole netbsd source tree starting with just a 
>farily primitive set of tools (pretty much a basic compiler and not much 
>else, except perhaps a make that is good enough to build our make).  All 
>the tools that are needed to compile netbsd should then be compiled from 
>that; doing it this way would, in principal, make it possible to build 
>NetBSD from a non-NetBSD machine, starting by building a set of 
>cross-tools that are then used to build the rest of the system.  I think 
>it is a mistake to require that you have NetBSD-current in order to build 
>NetBSD-current.

you need a consistent source tree at the very least.  i've not tried
it, but i imagine that the majority of the work would be assembling
the major toolchain (eg, cc, ld, as, etc, but also sh, awk, lex, yacc,
rpcgen, and so on).  once you've got that in place, the libraries to
support the binaries ought to come in short order (with libc instead
called libnetbsd?), and then the binaries themselves.  built, that is,
not necessarily completely *working*.

>Of course, I don't have the time to put my money where my mouth is, so I 
>shan't say any more on the subject.

mmm...me neither.

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