HP-UX and libPW

[Andreas Poenicke]

Hi all,

while building cfengine 2.0.3 I encountered a problem, 
which was already mentioned on gnu.cfengine.help:

Including libPW gives rise to an unresolved symbol:
Error()

The inclusion of libPW is triggert by configure.ac:

  hpux*|hp-ux*)
        AC_DEFINE(HPuUX)
        if test "$GCC" != "yes"; then
          AC_DEFINE(REGEX_MALLOC)
        fi

        AC_CHECK_LIB(PW, main)
        LIBS="$LIBS -lc"
        ;;

I'm not shure which part of libPW (AT&T Programmer's Workbench) is/was needet.
In my case it builds fine without.
There have been some changes in HP-UX, and I don't have
a box with HP-UX 9.XX available.

Nevertheless the use of libPW seems to be not harmless.

- First of all it depends on other libraries which are not
  included automatically. (As the problem with Error() shows.)

- According to http://devresource.hp.com:
  Some interfaces in "libPW.a are undocumented, unmaintained, non-standard and 
may perform slower 
  than similar interfaces in libc.  There will not be a 64-bit version of this 
library."
  "The use of these interfaces is strongly discouraged and may not be portable 
to future implementations of HP-UX. 
   Some of these interfaces or their equivalent may be available in libc."

- There are duplications in libc and libPW, and I don't know if they behave 
identical.

Most probably it was used for alloca, regexp  or regcmp.
With HP-UX 10.10 regcmp(), regex() moved from libPW to libc.

Dependend on the reason to include libPW it might be helpful
to change the order libc vs. libPW or to divide configure
in new and old versions of HP-UX.

Probably an HP-UX expert can correct me if I'm wrong.

Regards,
Andreas
-- 
Andreas Poenicke
Institut f"ur Theoretische Festk"orperphysik
Universit"at Karlsruhe, Wolfgang-Gaede-Str. 1, D-76128 Karlsruhe
e-mail: address@hidden