>I think that adding a host tool to work around our inability to write
>portable shell scripts is silly.  If we really can't trust ourselves,

If we are writing code that is intened to run on many platforms - then
sure shell script should be portable.  This however is a lot of work
[I've been doing it for a looong time], if the problem is simple hosting
our build - targeted to netbsd then I'd say that is an undesirable overhead.
Include a sane shell as part of the hosting kit.  (POSIX isn't always sane).

>nbmake could always add "|| exit $?" to every command it passes to the
>shell, hence avoiding the need to trust "sh -e" at all.

No, let's not.  I did something like that for automagically adding
chdir ${.CURDIR} && to the start of commands under certain circumstances
so the makefiles would work untouched with $MAKEOBJDIRPREFIX.
Mainly so I could avoid the pain/arguments re all the Makefiles that would
need fixing otherwise.  That was wrong, and adding || exit $? blindly
would probably be wrong too.

Thanks
--sjg