I am aware that our own NetBSD toolchain is being worked on right
at this moment to be brought in line with the current releases of
Binutils, GCC and GDB (anything else?) and that we're a little away
from that task being complete.

In the meantime, I have four other cross-development environments
I'd like to finalise: AVR (a nifty microcontroller), MS-Dos (yes,
you'd better believe it), Windows (both CYGWIN and MINGW32) and
Palm OS.

I'm short of knowledge on some facets of the actual development
tools, as well as on how best to re-integrate these into the package
system, as I have modified any of them that might have originally
worked to bring them in line with the present distributions: Binutils
2.11.90, GCC 3.1 and GDB 5.0 (hm, present?  my last snapshots,
anyway).

And, most intriguing, I totally fail to understand how to stop
these tools stomping on each other's feet in the <prefix>/lib
directory, where each "distribution" seems to install a subtly -
and sometimes anything but subtly - different version of libbfd.*,
libiberty.* and libopcodes.* (and libgdb.*, I should imagine, but
I haven't quite got this far yet :-(

As I'm not entirely interfering with the normal NetBSD toolchain
(I could use GCC 3.1, as it is a prerequisite for compiling the
libg++v3 library, but do I really need that!?  Hm, if anyone knows
how to --disable it, please let me know), I don't believe I need
to wait for that effort to be completed to get on with mine.

What I would like, is to get in touch with others who have battled
through this type of endeavour and share my problems and my
experiences with them.

If the discussion should alternatively take place here, please feel
free to point this out to me.

++L

PS: on the issue of applying the package system to the base
distribution, I would be interested in helping whoever has been
looking at this with one particular objective in mind: it would be
very useful if we could "pkg_delete" base distribution components.

PPS: on a similar tack, it would also be useful if the "pkg_info"
database was stored on /usr/ rather than /var/ so that it can be
distributed with a shared /usr/.  If there are problems involved,
I'd appreciate hearing what they are.