Re: Switching to GNU userland and tools - yay or nay?

[maya%netbsd.org@localhost]

For just using GNU utilities and update-alternatives like:

Note PATH is searched right to left, so if your PATH starts with:
/usr/local/bin:/usr/pkg/gnu/bin:...

It will search those paths first, and if you grab sysutils/coreutils
from pkgsrc, 'ls' will be the GNU one. It's not expected to cause
problems.

If you want GNU make to be called 'make', you can create symlinks like:
/usr/local/bin/make -> /usr/pkg/bin/gmake

(If anything complains about the symlinks, they can be hard links too)

I doubt you will run into many issues, maybe pkgsrc will be confusing.
invoke /usr/bin/make directly to keep on using it.


Less likely, but assuming you really do mean swapping base
utilities completely, and creating your own variant GNU/NetBSD:

On Wed, Oct 04, 2017 at 10:49:08AM +0000, Leon Taylor wrote:
> replacing .. NetBSD's version of libc (and anything else that I have forgotten) with the GNU alternatives.

I suspect that step will be a lot more work than the rest of them. libcs
are very strongly tied to the OS they are written for. I'd ask myself if
that step is really important because of how hard it can be.

Note you have a mini static userland including init at /rescue (use with
PATH=/rescue) so you can replace almost everything on a live install, as
long as you are logged in as root.

You may want to familiarize yourself with the 'boot -a' flag to switch
to /rescue/init if you damage things like libc.