[Gm2] Solaris Build [Was: Re: "exec" Procedure in iso-libraries?]

[john o goyo]

Gaius:

On 21/10/2015 13:03, Gaius Mulley wrote (in part):
> > By the way, how is the Solaris port going (he asked hopefully)?
[...]
> The solaris port has stalled alas - however - the good news is that the
> port to gcc-5.2.0 has begun.
[...]
As usual, Gaius, kudos to you.

> Some other good news - I've been given a sparc at work which will
> hopefully (if it installs etc) will run debian from July 2015 (debian
> stopped supporting the sparc platform at that time).  But this should
> allow for better testing - assuming the hardware still works and debian
> installs etc

It would be very interesting to see whether libgm2 builds on 
Debian/sparc.  (By the way, Oracle has realeased Linux on Sparc but only 
for sun4v machines.  There is also traffic on linux.debian.ports.sparc 
on this matter.)

As you know, I was unable to build libgm2 on Solaris.  A quick summary 
here may help.  Sparc machines -- technically, UltraSPARC, that is 
Sparcv9 and later -- are 64-bit machines but happily run 32-bit code. 
For this, Solaris ships with both 32- and 64-bit libraries.  So when 
building software on Solaris, you must decide whether to go 32- or 
64-bits.  Reasonable distributions, in my opinion, will build both. 
Until it broke, gm2 built both libraries and the compiler could generate 
either size.  When libgm2 was "broken out", configure began calling a 
non-existant shell script and I could not resolve that problem.

Thank you and good luck!

john