On Sat, 30 Jan 1999, David Huggins-Daines wrote:

> On Fri, Jan 29, 1999 at 11:28:35PM +0100, Coevoet wrote:
> > Would it be interesting to have that thing for netbsd?  I suppose you could
> > compile eg gcc with it.  And then you could mount a macbsd partition to do
> > some cross-compiling on a much faster machine ...
> 
> Can't you guys cross-compile from NetBSD/i386, NetBSD/ppc, NetBSD/sparc,
> NetBSD/alpha, etc, etc... already?  We do it all the time in the Linux
> world.  (Sure, I *test* kernels on a IIx, but I *compile* them on a
> Pentium-200 :-)

We can. It's not super easy, but it's doable. The problem is that the
NetBSD a.out tools have a lot of local mods which never made it back to
the FSF folks. I really don't understand why. I think the tools they were
based on were old when we started using them, and binutils had jumped a
major revision in the mean time.

The situation is on the mend, though. NetBSD a.out shared library support
is in the in-tree binutils (2.8.1 I think), and has been fed back.

The only problem I'm aware of is getting the assembler to work. We still
use the old m68k assembler. I think work's under way to get the 2.9.1
assembler to work for NetBSD/m68k.

> > Since I'm thinking of a new machine when the macosx
> > is there, I'm wondering about some scenario's...
> 
> Barring a major catastrophe, MacOS X should ship with GCC already.  It
> is basically OpenStep-for-Mach underneath it all, and an Objective-C
> compiler (and, therefore, a C compiler) is an essential part of the
> OpenStep environment.
> 
> Plus, of course, MacOS X has most of 4.4BSD in it somewhere anyway,

s/4.4BSD/NetBSD/  :-)  They actually used NetBSD for the userland
programs. :-)

> so why do you need pseudo-UNIX (MPW) when you've got the real
> thing? :-)

I was wondering the same thing. :-)

Take care,

Bill