In article <200104060908.CAA20898@shell17.ba.best.com> you write:
>As much as everyone wants to abandon the old monolithic arm32 port, it should
>be acknowledged that it did have one very nice feature:
>
>The userland was _absolutely_ identical, and the kernels could all be built
>trivially from any of the machine types. So if you built one of the machine
>types with 'make snapshot', you automatically built _all_ of them.
>
>What steps (if any!) are being taken to preserve this effort-saving feature?

At the moment, I don't know that anyone has plans in this direction.  Here
are a few of my thoughts on the subject, though:

The feature you want would be useful for other MACHINE_ARCHes, so any
solution should be usable by them too.  I believe that at present, you
should be able to build a coherent snapshot for a MACHINE other than your
own by setting MACHINE appropriately, so the problem is just that this will
rebuild lots of things that don't need rebuilding if you're using objdirs,
and will pick up things built for the old MACHINE if you're not.

Perhaps one solution would be to arrange that Makefiles can specify the name
of their objdir, so that Makefiles for most userland binaries would set it
to "obj.${MACHINE_ARCH}", and thus automatically pick up the results of the
last build on that MACHINE_ARCH.

Hmm.  I think the only change this would need to make itself would be to
have it check "obj.${MACHINE_ARCH}" as well as "obj" and "obj.${MACHINE}"
when looking for an objdir.  Then bsd.obj.mk would need to be changed to
check the Makefile's preferences when creating objdirs.  Anyone feel like
working this out properly?  It's not really my area (so few things are).

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