prebuild sanity checks

[Brooks Davis]

I just spent the better part of half a day trying to figure out why
Perl wouldn't build in a chroot environment.  I'd hit the problem
before, but couldn't remember what the solution was.  It turned out that
the lack of a /dev/null lead to a one line corruption of the makefile
with a totally unobvious cause made vastly worse by the fact that the
perl build makes autotools look reasonable. :P

This started me wondering if we shouldn't have a few sanity checks in
the build process so we refuse to build if the environment is missing
some really critical things.  Obviously, we can't test everything since
it would take too long even if we had appropriate tests, but a few
checks might save some hair pulling.  For this particular case, I can
think of two major ways to do it.  First, we could just require that
/dev/null exist to do anything.  That's probably a bit intrusive though.
Another option might be a new variable (or variables) that ports that
tend to break spectacularly and unobviously can set like:

BUILD_DEVS=	null zero

Does this seem like a reasonable thing to do?

-- Brooks

-- 
Any statement of the form "X is the one, true Y" is FALSE.
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