QUESTION: Is there an easy way of keeping ghc-4.08.2 from using any assembler code when compiling it from .hc files + sources?

No, there isn't an easy way. When compiling via C, GHC "mangles" the assembly output from the C compiler in order to support tail calls and some other optimisations. There's a native code generator, but currenly it can't be used for some of the library code.

DETAILS: Why do I want to do this? gmp-2.0.2 has some problems compiling on netbsd machines that can be solved by hiding all assembler code from the compiler.

I think this was a misconfiguration problem with GMP, as I mentioned in my other message to glasgow-haskell-bugs.

Having done so, I managed to bootstrap on NetBSD 1.3.2, but still have an inplace-compiler failure on 1.5. The error message is from the gcc assembler (see below), so I thought trying a pure C variant might help somewhat.

This is almost certainly an incompatibility between the exact flavour of GCC being used on NetBSD 1.5, and our assembly mangling machinery. If you add the flag -ddump-raw-asm, and send me the output, I might be able to tell what's wrong. Cheers, Simon