Hi all,

Using NetBSD since a while now, I noticed a small glintch which may require some modifications to some ports.

I am not sure if any other ports may benefit form this, but let's describe the scenario for i386. When a new NetBSD release gets out, I generally compile mine from source, for i386, i486, i586 and i686 optimizations. The build runs fine, until the point where it attempts to build the floppies using vnd, because of the size of the binary results which varies. The i586 and i686 builds are then failing at that point.

What I traditionally did was simply manually end the build, since at this point everything I was interested on was compiled already. So I would fire up the make command to tarup everything into release(7) format.

When NetBSD 1.6 came out, this procedure varied a little to manually complete the build, and the part about making the list of obsolete files or such (used for upgrading) also needed a special step. If this is not done properly, an upgrade done using these sets could have potential issues.

So I then realized that if building the floppies was optional, I would do it for i386 only and skip that part for other builds, similarly to how we can disable cat pages building, etc. If other ports could possibly benefit from this it may even be wanted as a global flag for all ports.

On some systems, there is quite a difference between i386 and i686 using NetBSD. Hence I beleive that building for i686 is not useless, and should be able to proceed completely.

I apologize if this list is not the ideal place for this post, tech-kern and tech-ports are currently the only lists I read, and possibly other ports could also use this flag...

Comments are appreciated.
Matt