m4-1.4.7: summary of successes

[Nelson H. F. Beebe]

I now have completed more than 120 build attempts for m4-1.4.7 on 29
different flavors of Unix, and all of my systems now have m4-1.4.7
installed.

On each system, installation preference is given to successful builds
with vendor-provided compilers, or when that compiler is gcc (or a
wrapped gcc), to the build from the latest available version of gcc.

More than 100 of these builds and test-suite validations have been
successful, with C compilers, and on some systems, C++ compilers.

A few more typecasts at various places in the source code could
increase the C++ success rate: the stricter ones do not accept
a statement like this one:

        icc -DHAVE_CONFIG_H -I. -I. -I.. -Kc++ -I/usr/local/include -c 
strnlen1.c
        strnlen1.c(31): error: a value of type "void *" cannot be used to 
initialize an entity of type "const char *"
            const char *end = memchr (string, '\0', maxlen);

        openCC -DHAVE_CONFIG_H -I. -I. -I.. -g -O2 -c strnlen1.c
        strnlen1.c: In function `size_t strnlen1(const char*, long unsigned 
int)':
        strnlen1.c:31: error: invalid conversion from `void*' to `const char*'

Some of the failures that turned up have led to bug reports to
compiler vendors/developers, and to the automake maintainers.

Compilers tested include at least these:

        * DEC Alpha cc and cxx
        * GNU gcc (many platforms)
        * HP cc (PA-RISC)
        * Intel icc (AMD64, IA-32, IA-64)
        * Open64 opencc and openCC on IA-64
        * PathScale pathcc and pathCC (on AMD64 and IA-32)
        * Portland Group pgcc and pgCC (on AMD64 and IA-32)
        * SGI cc, c89, and CC (IRIX MIPS)
        * Sun cc, c89, c99, and CC (Solaris SPARC, Solaris IA-32, and GNU/Linux 
IA-32)

Here is a table of my installations, sorted by operating system:

==========================================================================================
System                          O/S
==========================================================================================
Dell Latitude D600 Pentium M    Cygwin_NT-5.1 1.5.19(0.150/4/2) 2006-01-20 
13:28 i686
Apple Power Mac G4              Darwin 7.9.0 (Mac OS X Server 10.3.9 (7W98))
Apple MacPro                    Darwin 8.7.3 (Mac OS X 10.4.7 (8K1124))
Sun W40z                        FreeBSD 5.0-RELEASE #0
Sun W40z                        FreeBSD 6.1-RELEASE #0
Apple PowerMac G3               GNU/Linux 2.4.19-4a (Yellow Dog Linux release 
2.3 (Dayton))
DEC Alphastation 200 4/100      GNU/Linux 2.4.19-xfs-gentoo-cd
Sun Ultra 5/400                 GNU/Linux 2.4.26-sparc-r2 (Gentoo 1.4.16)
Intel Pentium 4                 GNU/Linux 2.6.16-1.2133_FC5 (Fedora Core 
release 5 (Bordeaux))
Apple PowerMac G4               GNU/Linux 2.6.16-gentoo-r7 (Gentoo Base System 
version 1.6.14)
Intel Pentium III               GNU/Linux 2.6.9-11.ELsmp (Red Hat Enterprise 
Linux AS release 4 (Nahant Update 1))
Dell PowerEdge 3250 IA-64       GNU/Linux 2.6.9-22.0.2.EL (Red Hat Enterprise 
Linux AS release 4 (Nahant Update 3))
SGI Indy-200                    GNU/Linux Gentoo 1.4.16
Sun W40z                        GNU/Linux Red Hat Enterprise Linux AS 4
Hewlett-Packard PA-RISC 8700    HP-UX B.11.11 U 9000/800
SGI Origin/200-4                IRIX 6.5
Sun W40z                        Minix-3 1.2 i686
Sun W40z                        NetBSD 1.6 (GENERIC)
SIMH VAX                        NetBSD 3.0 (GENERIC) #0
DEC Alpha 4100-5/466            OSF/1 4.0F
SIMH VAX                        OpenBSD 3.5 GENERIC#0
Sun W40z                        OpenBSD 3.9 GENERIC#617 i386
AMD Opteron 240                 Red Hat Enterprise Linux AS release 4 (Nahant 
Update 4)
SGI Altix 350                   SUSE LINUX Enterprise Server 9 (ia64), VERSION 
= 9, PATCHLEVEL = 3
Sun Ultra Enterprise 2900       Solaris 10
Intel Pentium 4                 Solaris 10 x86
Sun Ultra Enterprise 450/400    Solaris 7
Sun Ultra Enterprise 5500       Solaris 8
Sun Sun Fire V240               Solaris 9
==========================================================================================

Noteworthy are the less common platforms: GNU/Linux on Alpha, MIPS,
PowerPC, and SPARC, Minix on IA-32, and NetBSD and OpenBSD on the SIMH
VAX.

On Minix, I used gcc-3.4.3, rather than the default ACK (Amsterdam
Compiler Kit) cc.

My thanks go to several members of this list for helpful
correspondence and discussions.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
- Nelson H. F. Beebe                    Tel: +1 801 581 5254                  -
- University of Utah                    FAX: +1 801 581 4148                  -
- Department of Mathematics, 110 LCB    Internet e-mail: address@hidden  -
- 155 S 1400 E RM 233                       address@hidden  address@hidden -
- Salt Lake City, UT 84112-0090, USA    URL: http://www.math.utah.edu/~beebe/ -
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