Feedback on building and executing si for ppc32

Here's a little feedback on my effort to build and test the si on ppc32.
The distro I am using is SuSE 8.1 RC7.

1. Building the si went okay after I manually downloaded the
texinfo-4.3.tar.bz2 file. The entity checker produced a zero length file
because the gnu web site has now moved up to texinfo-4.5. I think the
entity checker needs to be corrected to avoid creating empty files when the
upstream source isn't there. I didn't know it was empty until several hours
later when the build failed.

2. Once the si was built and installed, I was unable to run lsblibchk
within it because there was no /lib/ld.so.1 in the si. I worked around this
limitation by making a link from ld-2.2.5.so to ld.so.1.

3. Running lsblibchk against the si produced one failure when checking
libncurses. The message was:

compareElfhdr: e_flags isn't expected value 0, found 8000 instead

4. When I looking through the instructions for doing the runtime tests it
says perl is needed. The si does not have perl. Does the test suite still
need it, or is this just a case of outdated docs?

5. When I tried executing the runtime tests they failed right away. The
failure happened when it was trying to install the i18n locales. The
message was "su: must be run from a terminal". Since I am using chroot I
guess this messes things up. Hopefully, this is a known situation and there
is a workaround to get things to proceed.

Regards,

Marvin Heffler
Linux Standard Base
IBM Linux Technology Center
11400 Burnet Road, Zip 908-1A33
Austin, TX 78758
(512) 838-0953    T/L 678-0953