Re: NetBSD-HEAD amd64 refuses to build

[Alan Barrett <apb%cequrux.com@localhost>]

On Wed, 18 Dec 2013, Thomas Mueller wrote:
> > [56 quoted lines]

Please trim your quotes!  Quote enough to remind readers of the 
context, and quote anything that you respond to directly, but 
there's no need to quote the entire message.

> I could and probably will omit -j parameter with build.sh, and 
> might try to build for i386.

Christos already reported that there's a known bug in the ".BEGIN" 
target in a Makefile that might cause the problem you see.

> I just looked in NetBSD's /etc/mk.conf and found the lines
> #if BSD_PKG_MK
> #endif
> with pkgsrc stuff in between, so those lines are still there.

It should be ".if" and ".endif", not "#if" and "#endif", like this:

.if defined(BSD_PKG_MK)
pkgsrc stuff goes here
.endif

> But in the logs for daily builds on 
> http://releng.netbsd.org/cgi-bin/builds.cgi
>
> I notice -j11, which would look to be too much for my CPU.

I suggest starting with a -j value equal to the number of CPUs, 
and then you can increase or decrease it as appropriate.  Using a 
-j value much larger than the number of CPUs is unlikely to be 
useful.  For example, if you have 4 CPUs, then try -j4, and you 
might later decide to decrease it to -j3 or increase it to -j5 or 
-j6, but it's probably not useful to try anything higher than -j8.

> Many successful builds, but netbsd-5-2 just had 3 ok, 52 failed, 
> so even the stable branches don't succeed all the time.

Yes, there are sometimes build breaks in the stable branches.

> It is possible not only that my src tree might be corrupted 
> but also that my NetBSD installation on USB stick might be 
> corrupted.

It's possible, but then I would expect more obvious symptoms.

> I could define a separate /etc/makenetbsd.conf with changeable 
> options to be used some of the time.

Yes, and you can pass "-V MAKECONF=/etc/makenetbsd.conf" to 
build.sh to make it use that file instead of /etc/make.conf.

> I must bear in mind that FreeBSD is much stabler than NetBSD on 
> my hardware.

Please report crashes.  I don't know whether there's a document 
on how to do that, but you can use the send-pr(1) program, and 
include the relevant kernel messages (the green text you might see 
on the console), and any extra information you are able to gather 
from the kernel debugger (an abbreviated version of the output 
from ddb's "bt" command is often useful).

> Now I think I could use a newer gcc from FreeBSD ports if I 
> choose or need to cross-compile NetBSD from FreeBSD.
>
> I always use build.sh to build NetBSD system, have never used 
> make directly for that purpose.

Please just use build.sh.  It should allow building NetBSD from 
FreeBSD, or building NetBSD from another version of NetBSD, or 
many other things.

It is theoretically possible to use a different compiler, but 
that's usually done only by people who are porting NetBSD to a new 
platform, porting a new compiler to NetBSD, or something similarly 
tricky.

--apb (Alan Barrett)