This comment relates to the February 4, 2007 version of the "Gentoo Prefixed Portage Bootstrap Process for Solaris" document. I am trying to follow the bootstrap process on a Solaris box which is perhaps more spartan than usual (it was set up by someone else for testing with a BEA WebLogic application server and has served that purpose with success). This Solaris box did not have the 'ar' utility installed, causing stoppage at the step ./bootstrap-prefix.sh $EPREFIX/tmp sed I eventually got around this by installing a precompiled binutils package using the "pkg-get" facility (http://www.bolthole.com/solaris/pkg-get.html). It would have been nice to be able to build binutils from source (I tried to do ./bootstrap-prefix.sh $EPREFIX/tmp binutils). However, this does not seem to work; at some point there is a complaint that 'ar' is missing and building binutils fails. In summary then, my suggestion is to list 'ar' as a prerequisite along with 'gcc' and 'wget' at the beginning of the document. Reproducible: Always Info printed by "uname -a" command: SunOS 5.10 Generic_118855-14 i86pc i386 i86pc Solaris
A system with an incomplete linker installed is always a problem for a source-based solution like Gentoo. Without a sane compiler and linker, there is no way to even compile/install one as you found out. So there is really nothing we can do here for now as long as we use a source-based bootstrap. Sorry.
