On Wed, Nov 19, 2003 at 09:45:02PM +0100, Johnny Billquist wrote:
  | If TOOLDIR is set, the building of the tools tries to use one or two
  | binaries from the tools. Since they don't exist yet for you, that's why
  | you get that error.

This is simply not correct; I regularly perform builds with something
like this:
	rm -rf /var/obj/woot
	mkdir /var/obj/woot
	setenv MAKEOBJDIRPREFIX /var/obj/woot
	setenv TOOLDIR /var/obj/woot/tools
	./build.sh -m vax tools
	    # 7 minutes later, $TOOLDIR is baked

In this case, $TOOLDIR set in the environment to a non-existant
directory, and build.sh correctly populated $TOOLDIR.