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[20180317] The adventure of rebuilding g4u from source
I was asked by a long-time g4u user on help with rebuilding g4u from sources. After pointing at the instructions on the homepage, we figured out that a few lose odds and ends didin't match. After bouncing some advices back and forth, I ventured into the frabjous joy of starting a rebuild from scratch, and quick enough ran into some problems, too.

Usually I cross-compile g4u from Mac OS X, but for the fun of it I did it on NetBSD (7.0-stable branch, amd64 architecture in VMware Fusion) this time. After waiting forever on the CVS checkout, I found that empty directories were not removed - that's what you get if you have -P in your ~/.cvsrc file.

I already had the hint that the "g4u-build" script needed a change to have "G4U_BUILD_KERNEL=true".

From there, things went almost smooth: building indicated a few files that popped up "variable may be used uninitialized" errors, and which -- thanks to -Werror -- bombed out the build. Fixing was easy, and I have no idea why that built for me on the release. I have sent a patch with the required changes to the g4u-help mailing list. (After fixing that I apparently got unsubscribed from my own support mailing list - thank you very much, Sourceforge ;)).

After those little hassles, the build worked fine, and gave me the floppy disk and ISO images that I expected:

>       ls -l `pwd`/g4u*fs
>       -rw-r--r--  2 feyrer  staff  1474560 Mar 17 19:27 /home/feyrer/work/NetBSD/cvs/src-g4u.v3-deOliviera/src/distrib/i386/g4u/g4u1.fs
>       -rw-r--r--  2 feyrer  staff  1474560 Mar 17 19:27 /home/feyrer/work/NetBSD/cvs/src-g4u.v3-deOliviera/src/distrib/i386/g4u/g4u2.fs
>       -rw-r--r--  2 feyrer  staff  1474560 Mar 17 19:27 /home/feyrer/work/NetBSD/cvs/src-g4u.v3-deOliviera/src/distrib/i386/g4u/g4u3.fs
>       -rw-r--r--  2 feyrer  staff  1474560 Mar 17 19:27 /home/feyrer/work/NetBSD/cvs/src-g4u.v3-deOliviera/src/distrib/i386/g4u/g4u4.fs
>       ls -l `pwd`/g4u.iso
>       -rw-r--r--  2 feyrer  staff  6567936 Mar 17 19:27 /home/feyrer/work/NetBSD/cvs/src-g4u.v3-deOliviera/src/distrib/i386/g4u/g4u.iso
>       ls -l `pwd`/g4u-kernel.gz
>       -rw-r?r--  1 feyrer  staff  6035680 Mar 17 19:27 /home/feyrer/work/NetBSD/cvs/src-g4u.v3-deOliviera/src/distrib/i386/g4u/g4u-kernel.gz 
Next steps are to confirm the above changes as working from my faithful tester, and then look into how to merge this into the build instructions .

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