Re: [vile] How to build vile in a 'Jail shell' where uname isn't available?

[Thomas Dickey]

----- Original Message -----
| From: "Chris Green" <address@hidden>
| To: address@hidden
| Sent: Thursday, April 9, 2015 7:02:26 AM
| Subject: Re: [vile] How to build vile in a 'Jail shell' where uname isn't 
available?
| 
| On Thu, Apr 09, 2015 at 11:59:25AM +0100, Chris Green wrote:
| > I'm trying to build vile for a hosting account where I have ssh
| > access
| > but only to a limited 'Jail shell'.  The specific problem is that
| > uname isn't available so config.guess fails.
| > 
| > What needs to be set so that configure won't need config.guess?
| > 
| > ... or are there other ways around this?
| > 
| Existing executables on the system where I want to build report as:-
| 
|     ELF 32-bit LSB executable, Intel 80386, version 1 (SYSV), for
|     GNU/Linux 2.6.9, dynamically linked (uses shared libs), for
|     GNU/Linux 2.6.9, stripped
| 
| Does this give enough information?

perhaps - config.guess does not use an absolute path when running "uname".
You could make a simple shell script this does an "echo" of the information,
and call that "uname". In the config.guess script it does this:

UNAME_MACHINE=`(uname -m) 2>/dev/null` || UNAME_MACHINE=unknown
UNAME_RELEASE=`(uname -r) 2>/dev/null` || UNAME_RELEASE=unknown
UNAME_SYSTEM=`(uname -s) 2>/dev/null` || UNAME_SYSTEM=unknown
UNAME_VERSION=`(uname -v) 2>/dev/null` || UNAME_VERSION=unknown

so the script has to have a case statement for those options, e.g.,

#!/bin/sh
case .$1 in
.-m) echo i386;;
.-r) echo 2.6.9-1;;
.-s) echo Linux;;
.-v) echo anything;;
esac

However, you may still run into problems later, since config.guess
takes that information and makes some complicated check to see which
flavor it needs.  I'm looking for instance at

https://github.com/gittup/ncurses/blob/gittup/config.guess

lines 970 and later.

-- 
Thomas E. Dickey <address@hidden>
http://invisible-island.net
ftp://invisible-island.net