Re: [Pnet-developers] Re: [DotGNU]Portable.net on AIX 5+

[Rhys Weatherley]

On Thursday 02 December 2004 10:04 am, Peter Colson wrote:

> > That stuff comes from the third-party libgc package, so we don't
> > really know
> > much about how it works across AIX versions.
>
> Yes that didn't click when I typed it in. I picked those 2 references,
> but saw others (i.e., support/regex.c and cscc/cpp/ansidecl.h) so
> thought that there had been some AIX work done in pnet.

Those are also third party code, imported into pnet.  The core code of pnet is 
written to be as generic as possible.  Greping for "#ifdef AIX" is not a good 
way to see if code will run on AIX.  I know that the following code probably 
works on AIX although personally I've never tried it:

    #include <stdio.h>
    int main(int argc, char *argv[])
    {
        printf("Hello World!\n");
        return 0;
    }

By your logic, because that code doesn't contain "works on AIX 5L 5.2" in the 
README, it couldn't possibly work!  Or that I must regular testing on every 
AIX version known to man on the off-chance that IBM decides to rewrite AIX to 
disobey Posix.

Portable.NET is written to be as portable as possible.  There are some ugly 
things like libgc and libffi that are unavoidably non-portable, but we try to 
keep them isolated.

If you want to know if pnet will run on your particular AIX flavour, how about 
you try running it?  You're asking me for an answer to a question that only 
you have the facilities to answer!

> > I suppose this is a long-winded way of saying that in the absence of
> > an AIX
> > volunteer, you just became it. :-)
>
> OK, but I'm still trying to determine if pnet has/hasn't been tried on
> AIX previously? If it has maybe the particular version used has been
> forgotten?

People have posted on the list in the past (search the archives) that they 
managed to get it going on their particular brand of AIX.  But since no one 
has yet committed to test pnet version to version, it is possible that things 
have been missed.  Feel free to submit a patch.

> If it hasn't the "AIX" reference on //www.dotgnu.org probably should be
> removed.

Then I would have to remove basically everything from the list except 
Linux/i386 and Windows.  And then have to deal with people claiming that it 
doesn't work on anything, when it fact it does work on a wide variety of 
platforms.

We are not going to remove a platform merely because we lack testing 
facilities.  Rather, we should encourage people to correct whatever problems 
come up as time goes on.  All we can say is "we've seen it working on 
platforms A, B, and C in the past".  In the absence of an actual bug report, 
we should not assume that it is broken.

I'm still waiting on a bug report describing the problem that started this 
thread.  "It doesn't work" is insufficient.

Cheers,

Rhys.