From: Jeff Voskamp
Subject:    Re: porting xhier to new architecture
Date:    Mon, 04 Oct 2004 15:53:43 -0400
Mailer:    Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.7.3) Gecko/20040922

Mike wrote:
> Hey Jeff, I was wondering how much you had to do with making xhier work
> on Linux?  If the answer's anything more than "nothing at all", I'm
> curious, do you know how it was bootstrapped?
> 
> I'm trying to port it to a new architecture which can run Linux
> binaries, but I'd prefer to not have to cheat in that manner (not the
> least because I have to mix binaries from both debian30 and debian31,
> for some reason).
> 
> Thanks,
> 
> Mike

I did the original port.  RedHat 6.[1|2] and BSDi 2.0: near simultaneously, 
many many years ago.
I had some notes on setting up a port but I can't find them now - where did 
the home directories from math.uwaterloo.ca go?  From memory:
1. xh-first-time the new archmaster.  Lie about the architecture type to get 
the scripts over.
2. push over xhier, xhier,dev, xhier_building.
3. find and kill architecture specific binaries.
4. correct the lies told in step 1.
5. push over the source for all packages on the machine.
6. Fix/rebuild mfcf/config.h and mfcf/param.h
7. Now you can start to rebuild the packages there.  Can't recall what else 
you may have to pull over, but it's not a lot to get the basics done.
8. Don't forget to COPY ALL YOUR CHANGES TO CAPO AS SOON AS YOU'RE HAPPY 
WITH THEM.

Jeff

This seems silly. Xhier ought to be portable! But I'm not surprised that it isn't.