NetBSD 5.0 looks cool

[Giorgos Keramidas]

On Thu, 18 Feb 2010 14:09:54 +0530, Masoom Shaikh <masoom.shaikh at gmail.com> wrote:
> here is excellant intoduction to NetBSD-5.0
>
> http://www.netbsd.org/~ad/50/img0.html
>
> certain statements are very impressive in those slides like "Build any
> NetBSD platform from any POSIX environment"
> $ uname -s -m
> Linux i686
> $ cd netbsd-src
> $ ./build.sh -m sparc64 release
>
> develop and test 32 bits apps on 64 bit env
> cc -m 32
>
> does FreeBSD has those two features ?

NetBSD needs a *very* minimal set of POSIX tools to build, e.g. you can
get away with an sh(1) utility and a pretty basic make(1) tool.  They
have really done a magnificent job at constructing a build system that
can bootstrap itself from a tiny set of build tools.

FreeBSD also has _some_ of the necessary build glue to do similar sort
of stuff, but AFAIK we only support cross-building from one FreeBSD
architecture to another FreeBSD architecture.  So you need to have at
least *some* version of FreeBSD to build another.