Re: [patch] Get coreutils 6.1 to build on a ANSI 89 compiler

[Petter Reinholdtsen]

[Bob Proulx]
> With that in mind may I ask a few questions?  (Please make sure to
> keep the mailng list address in the reply.)
> 
>  * What architecture are you using RHEL 2.1 AS on?
>      uname -m

i686

>  * What compiler is available on that platform?
>      gcc --version

2.96

>  * What libc is available there?
>      ldd --version

ldd (GNU libc) 2.2.4
Copyright (C) 2001 Free Software Foundation, Inc.

> And now the big question.  Could you say a few words about why you are
> using that platform?

I work as a unix sysadmin at the university of Oslo.  We have ~2000
unix machines to maintain (linux, solaris, aix, tru64 unix, irix,
hp-ux, etc), and ~50 of them use RHEL 2.1.  Most of these 50 are
production Oracle servers.

To provide our maintainence scripts with a common and sound base to
run on, we build several tools for all the unix versions we support,
and coreutils is one of these tools.  So we want it to build on RHEL
2.1 while we wait for the old machines to die or be upgraded to newer
hardware and operating systems.

I also ran into problems building coreutils on HP-UX (cc segfault) and
aix (messed up system header), and might send patches to get this
working too.  But those platforms are being dropped sooner than RHEL
2.1, so we have not yet decided if it is worth the effort. :)

Friendly,
-- 
Petter Reinholdtsen