On Fri, 20 Jan 2006, Elad Efrat wrote:
> this is 2006. i hope that internet usage has become rather wide that
> refering people to online documentation is something we can afford to
> do; after all, to use netbsd they had to *download* it from somewhere.

I strongly disagree.  The man pages and source files on a working system
should be enough.  Online documentation can be more friendly, and offer
more hints and tips, but it should not contain essential information
that is not also available off line.

> "These steps can either be performed manually, or using the build.sh
> command that was introduced in section Chapter 27, Crosscompiling NetBSD
> with build.sh.
> This section will give instructions on how to build a
> native kernel using manual steps, the following section Section 28.5,
> ?Building the kernel using build.sh? describes how to use build.sh to do
> the same."

OK, so if you read carefully enough and follow enough links, you can
figure out what to do.  I'd prefer it to be less easy to go wrong.

> > Then I'm glad apb, rather than you, is dealing with the PR.  I
> > strongly believe *something* needs to change here.  I'd prefer it
> > were the code,
>
> heh; even though throughout this mail and previous it is clear that if
> anything, the documentation needs updating, you prefer to update the
> code.

I'd prefer to change the code to give better error messages, to give
better warnings about things that are unlikely to work, perhaps to just
do extra steps by magic to make a requested operation work, and to give
the option of building with the native tools (and appropriately loud
warnings); and to change the documentation to match the code, and to
explain the recommend way of building.  This will take me some time.

--apb (Alan Barrett)