[ Apologies if I'm reducing the number of lists this goes to -- I read
  most NetBSD lists through a mail-to-news gateway, and messages sent to
  multiple lists confuse things. ]

In article <20001221145321.A16756@theory.cs.uni-bonn.de> you write:
>But you still build everything anew, while currently, I run a make build
>and forget the machine until everything is ready, and it only needs
>90%+10%+10%+10% instead of 100%+100%+100% build time.

Assuming you're talking about the userland code here, I see this as a bug in
the build system.  There are several NetBSD/powerpc ports, several
NetBSD/mipsel ports and many NetBSD/m68k ports.  Even if we don't split
NetBSD/arm32, there will eventually be two NetBSD/arm ports.  Trying to
collapse each of these groups of ports into one, with a shared sys/arch
subdirectory, a shared install mechanism and a shared portmaster seems
ludicrous.

The right solution is surely to fix the build system so that it can skip
over chunks of the tree that have already been built for a given
MACHINE_ARCH, or indeed for all machines, rather than to smush the world
until it stops confusing the build mechanism.

-- 
Ben Harris                                                   <bjh21@netbsd.org>
Portmaster, NetBSD/arm26               <URL:http://www.netbsd.org/Ports/arm26/>