[fpc-pascal] Re: 2.6.0 for Solaris?

[microcode at zoho.com]

On Thu, 10 May 2012 07:27:22 +0000 Mark Morgan Lloyd wrote:

> microcode wrote:

> > What SPARC box(es) do you have? I may be able to host Solaris
> > development systems if needed although the SPARC stuff would have to be
> > scheduled since I cannot leave them on all the time because of the huge
> > noise and heat factor. The Intel box is on most of the time.

> I've got a range here: mostly U60 running "in anger", a U80, E4500, U10s,
> a U1, plus some museum pieces I can't find an OS for. I'm also one of
> very few people who've got an SS1000E running Linux SMP, but that's not a
> recent distro and because of library versions (**) I'm not sure what if
> any version of FPC I could get running on it.

The E4500s are monsters, aren't they? I'd like to have one but I'm out of
space. I'd like an Ultra 80 as well. I could find a spot for one of those.

I've got a stack of Sun Fire 210s and 440s. They're very nice but they're
in various states of needing odds and ends and I don't have much disk
capacity but plenty for development machines. The 210s are two bangers and
are fast enough for building large apps in a reasonable timeframe. The 440s
are slow but they're unstoppable, they run like a freight train, nothing
bothers them. I'm hoping to get a pile of RAM but so far all the promises
haven't panned out. I have a bad UPS and when I get that fixed I'll have
more machines available to come online whenever needed.

> ** When a program is built, the (Linux) linker puts the actual filenames
> of the .so files it expects to find in the binary- not the names of any
> symlinks. That means that once you've built a binary using standard
> parameters, that binary /requires/ the same collection of .so versions
> that was on the development system 

Right you are. Before reading your post I built glibc-2.14 and tried fp
again but no joy..

>. ... I managed to get around that to backport FPC from Solaris 10 to 8
>but in general I think it's better to start off with a version that runs
>and work forwards. 

Agreed.

> I wholeheartedly agree that power, and in the Summer heat, is a massive
> problem. There's only so much we can afford, and even with substantial
> air conditioning things can get pretty unpleasant in my workroom and the
> adjacent machineroom. That's why I'm only able to offer U10s as always-up
> systems, Vincent used one of those for Lazarus two or three years ago and
> I've tried to test both FPC and Lazarus on Linux and Solaris fairly
> regularly since. 

Sun makes awfully nice boxes and Solaris is a very nice development
platform. I hope the guys will keep FPC going on Solaris. There are many
Solaris 10 on Sun fans.

> > I appreciate your offer for packages but since you or somebody else has
> > already pointed me to the buildfaq, I'll try this on my own and when I
> > get stuck I'll email the list again. Thanks again for all the help.

> You might find it useful to go to the Mantis bug tracker and look at the
> SPARC-related bugs I've reported- use "View Issues", expand "Search",
> select "Mark Morgan Lloyd" from "Reporter" then "Use Filter". You might
> in particular need http://mantis.freepascal.org/view.php?id=18271 when
> getting your initial FPC binary installed on Solaris 10. 

Thanks for the info.


> When you get to compiling, you might find it necessary to use a command
> line like this: 
>
> make NOGDB=1 OPT='-O- -gl'
>
> What that does is tell it to not try to use the optional libgdb in the fp
> text-mode IDE, and it disables optimisation in the compiler binary (/not/
> the compiler's ability to apply optimisation) so that if something goes
> wrong you can get a useful backtrace.

Thanks.


> On Debian, you'll need [checks] build-essential, gdb, libgpmg1-dev, and
> some combination of libncurses5-dev and libncursesw5-dev. If you get as
> far as building Lazarus use trunk (on SPARC) and treat libgtk2.0-dev and
> possibly libqt4pas-dev as prerequisites, if those aren't available (e.g.
> on Slackware) I suggest we continue on the Lazarus mailing list. 

I don't think I'll spend any further time looking at Linux, as the
Slackware copy of 2.6.0 seems to work for a few small samples. If I can't
get fp built on Solaris SPARC or if it doesn't work on Solaris Intel (will
check that next week) then I'll think about what to do next, probably just
live with Emacs. If I get bored and my list of things to do ever gets small
enough I'll look at rebuilding 2.6.0 Linux under 2.6.0 with my glibc.