On Jun 22, 2007, at 12:12 PM, Taylor R Campbell wrote:

+from-scratch requires nothing but a C compiler and an operating
system, fetches a tarball containing pre-generated C files,
and bootstraps the whole system from that. Slow.

I realize the pain involved in going this route, but it seems like we're trading mere compilation time for engineering time, and the latter is almost always more expensive. I do understand your desire to not heat up your lap, but speaking from just my personal viewpoint, I'd far rather have a nice, generic port which took an hour to compile than have to figure out which of n ports to use and also deal with the fragility of these ports over what could be multiple OS releases and variable availability of suitable bootstrap compilers for whatever architecture / word size (ppc, ppc64, x86_32, x86_64, and so on) I might be trying to target. An hour is a fine amount of time to go warm up the latte maker and make myself a nice latte to drink while I wait. :-)