make buildworld dies

[Joshua Lokken]

On Sat, 18 Dec 2004 11:49:53 -0500, Zachary Huang <bees.msu at gmail.com> wrote:
> Sorry for so many questions. On yet another FreeBSD (4.2), I  first
> did a sysinstall to upgrade to 5.10, 

Wha?  4.2 is very old. and 5.3 is the latest production release.
I'll assume the above is a typo for 4.10.  I'm not certain that
you can directly upgrade from 4.2 to 4.10, but in any case, you
want to read /usr/src/UPGRADING.

> it messed up everything because
> the source (/usr/src) did not match all the config files, so sendmail
> complains a lot and cannot ssh or telnet to the system.  I then did a
> cvsup (without specify which release, simply "cvs") successfully (took
> like 10 hrs)

I don't believe this is what you wanted to do.  If you're going to
track a particular release, let's say 4.10, then you want to use
the appropriate cvs tag for that src tree, which for 4.10 release
will be RELENG_4_10.
 
> cd /usr/src
> make buildworld
> 
> after about 8 min,  it stopped with the following error:
> cc -O -pipe -DSHELL -I .I/usr/src/bin/sh -Wall -Wfont (? cannot see my
> own writing) -c /usr/src/bin/sh
> /usr/src/bin/sh/mknodes.c:101.
> initializer element is not constant
> ***error code 1
> Stop in /usr/src/bin/sh
> *** error code 1
> stop in /usr/src.

That seems reasonable.
 
> now I am sort of stuck.  I made a new kernel the day before the
> sysinstall, but now I cannot even try compile a new kernel because it
> compains the config file is newer than what it wants.

It sounds like your src tree needs to be cleaned up (# rm -rf /usr/src/*)
and that you should read the Handbook chapter on using cvsup, write
yourself a src-supfile, or use one of the examples, and then follow the
well-documented procedure for upgrading your system from source.
 
> is my system totally messed up?  

Probably, but the handbook is a great resource, and will help you
to prevent it from happening again.

> right now apache still works, but I can telnet or ssh out but to the host....

Wow, I'm surprised that Apache is still able to run ;)

-- 
Joshua Lokken
Open Source Advocate