Drat.  So, I wonder what's been broken by updating userland from
   1.5BETA2 to 1.5?  The emacs build is dying in its very early stage -
   it runs configure and then tries to build a shared binary and run it.
   That obviously worked ok when I first built emacs (Jan 5) without X
   support.  I last updated pkgsrc on Jan 5 btw.

it's possible that emacs uses & needs "cpp" to work properly.
   
   I may have hosed something by simply unpacking the 1.5 sets over the
   old ones?  While running them mind you.  I've done this ok in the past
   with tar and the --unlink bit but I can never remember if its 
   	tar xfp - --unlink 
   	tar --unlink xfp - 
   or what, and tar is very pedantic about it, so I used pax this time which
   is what the install/upgrade scripts use, but I don't know if pax does
   the --unlink business.

pax does --unlink by default, as does our GNU tar since about 1.3 or so.
   
   If someone can confirm that they can build emacs (not xemacs) from
   pkgsrc with X support ok on 1.5/sparc64, I'll assume I've fried
   something and re-do the "upgrade".

try installing one of the other toolchains, and see if that works...