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

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On Wed, 9 May 2012 18:44:08 +0200 Jonas Maebe wrote:

> There is no real Solaris maintainer. Pierre sometimes works on it and I
> run nightly Solaris/SPARC regression tests (for as long as I still have
> access to a Solaris/SPARC machine), but I definitely do not support the
> platform. Solaris/SPARC is on life support, as far as I am concerned: I
> try to make sure that port doesn't get new bugs, but I don't work on
> fixing any existing bugs in it. I don't know to what extent Pierre wants
> to support Solaris/i386 and Solaris/x86-64.

Thanks, that is important to know. My main use would be on Solaris,
possibly the SPARC version so if the project doesn't view that platform as
having a future I would rather know now.

> > 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? 

> It's a matter of what the libc version happens to be on the system that
> was used to build libgdb, which is simply someone's personal machine. 

Ok, but if that is what happened I would expect a lot of people not to be
able to run fp except maybe Fedora 16 or Gentoo users who always have the
latest stuff. I guess I am wrong though or you would already know about it.
Maybe it would be better to build on a non-bleeding edge system so people
with older distros and pieces could still run everything? I very seldom
upgrade but maybe everybody else does. I try to find a good working setup
and then don't change it much. That's kind of why I was asking about 2.6.0
since it is the current release. I was planning on staying on that until I
had a really good reason not to.

> > 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? 

> The examples are probably one of the worst maintained parts of the
> distribution, because almost nobody uses them. That said, some of them
> certainly will require the development versions of certain libraries to
> be installed (e.g., some of them use ncurses, so you'll need to have the
> development package of ncurses to be installed to compile them).

Thanks for the info here also. I have ncurses and almost every possible
development tool and toolkit installed. I am careful not to randomly
install non-development libraries though. If the examples are not
maintained or used then I'll just do the best I can. I don't have any
experience with Pascal so I was glad to see some sample code.