[fpc-pascal] Subject: Re: 2.6.0 for Solaris? And other questions

[Tomas Hajny]

On Wed, May 9, 2012 18:26, microcode at zoho.com wrote:
> From: "Tomas Hajny"
>
>>> Do you guys plan on releasing the 2.6.0 version on Solaris and is there
>>> a timeframe? Do you plan on continuing to support Solaris? I would be
>>> interested in running both the Intel and SPARC versions if they come
>>> available.
>
>> I'm not the right one to answer this question but I believe that this
>> depends mainly on availability of a maintainer for this operating
>> system.
>> You may try building the compiler (and RTL) for that platform and it may
>> work well for you, but you may encounter some issues.
>
> I didn't find a list of maintainers on the home page and I don't know how
> Free Pascal development is organized. Hopefully the maintainer will speak
> up
> and in the meantime I will look at the build guide you mentioned further
> on.

My point was that there has been no official / dedicated maintainer for
that platform within the core team recently which is the reason why there
are no official builds for Solaris for version 2.6.0. Mark Morgan Lloyd
who already responded to your e-mail probably has the most experience with
these targets at the moment.


>>> Another question is on 2.6.0 on Linux. I cannot run the fp ide because
>>> I
>>> have glibc 2.9. The error message I get says
>>> fp: /lib64/libc.so.6: version `GLIBC_2.14' not found (required by fp)
>>>
>>> That is really a recent version! Even the latest Slackware from 1 year
>>> ago only has glibc 2.13. Is this really needed or can it be built
>>> against
>>> my version of glibc?
>>
>> It should be possible to build against your version of glibc, but you'll
>> probably have to do it yourself (or use FPC binaries provided by your
>> distribution).
>
> There are no binaries provided by my distribution. It's Slackware! But the
> question was, was it really necessary to use such a recent glibc?

I'm not sure what's the supposed meaning of "It's Slackware!" in your
e-mail. We do not actively track which Linux distributions support FPC
directly.

Anyway, the particular glibc version was probably selected by the ld
linker when compiling the binaries on the builder's machine. We cannot
guarantee compatibility of the provided binaries with specific Linux
distributions. Our _compiler_ does not use glibc at all on Linux - the
main reason being exactly the fact that it's very difficult to ensure
compatibility with different versions used by different distributions. The
good point for you out of that is that you should be able to use the
distributed compiler for rebuilding the IDE on your own machine and
linking to the glibc version available there.


 .
 .
>>> I have various other stuff going wrong when trying to build some of the
>>> samples like the fpc compiler not being able to find certain libraries.
>>> Should I post the error messages here or should I look for a bug
>>> tracker?
>
>> This depends on what the 'certain libraries' are. If you try to compile
>> samples linking to external (3rd party) libraries, this is no fpc bug -
>> you need to make sure to have development packages of the respective 3rd
>> party libraries installed using tools appropriate for your distribution
>> first.
>
> I believe they are fpc libraries but I will have to check again. Do you
> expect that all of the examples will normally build on Linux without
> errors
> or is it normal to have some problems?

Basic examples should certainly work. In general, if you get problems when
linking to particular libraries (.so), this should not be because of fpc
libraries but because of something missing on your machine. If you get a
compiler error complaining about units not found, it may be due to wrong
(FPC) configuration performed during your installation (which may or may
not be due to some bug in our installer, but that is hard to assess
without more specific information). Please check what's going on there and
possibly see our FAQ for common issues.

Tomas