2) run make distclean two times to kill nearly all state in the build system.
Thank you for that remark as i wondered if that is still needed.
It is rarely needed, I only do it if I revitalize an old checkout, or after very heavy changes (like e.g. the integration of the unicode branch and the creation of rtl-*) but moving units in SVN might leave out state .o and .ppu's, and the fpmake binary also holds state.
The first clean runs fpmake to let it clean as much as possible, the second cleans out by zapping *.o *.ppu with wildcards.
Personally I would avoid introducing other complicating factors like GIT (which is occasionally not synced)
For the record: i did not suggest using git/github, rather download the zipfile in order to be able to do a quick check. Usually i would point to ftp archive and download (recent) sources from there but those seem not to have been updated for while now.
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IMHO still not reason to recommend potentially out of sync purposes for validation. A second checkout is easiest.