[Chicken-hackers] [PATCH] Build/Test CHICKEN on AIX

[Erik Falor]

This is a report on my latest efforts at porting CHICKEN to AIX.

I finally gave up on supporting the -deploy option on AIX as AIX's
XCOFF binaries just have nothing comparable to an ELF binary's $ORIGIN
search path token:

https://www.ibm.com/developerworks/community/forums/html/topic?id=77777777-0000-0000-0000-000014036328
(no replies)

http://mail.openjdk.java.net/pipermail/ppc-aix-port-dev/2012-September/000108.html
(this thread bottoms out with 'I have been investigating and the
answer does appear to be "no" :-(')

The next-best thing that the AIX linker provides is the -L switch.
Form the man page:

    The -L '.' adds the current directory to the library search path
    that the system loader uses to locate the shrsub.o shared object.
    At run time, this program is loaded only if it is run from a
    directory containing an instance of the shrsub.o file or if the
    shrsub.o file is found in the /usr/lib standard library directory.
    To allow the program to be run from anywhere, use the option -L
    `pwd`.

http://publib.boulder.ibm.com/infocenter/aix/v6r1/topic/com.ibm.aix.cmds/doc/aixcmds3/ld.htm?resultof=%22%6c%64%22%20

Which would work so long as you kept the bundle in a path that exactly
matches what `pwd` would have reported at build-time.

I imagine that there are at least a few other platforms where -deploy
doesn't work.  But I couldn't see any attempt made in csc.scm to
remove this functionality or replace it with a warning on such
platforms, so maybe this is a 1st time.

I modified tests/runtests.sh to skip over the deployment tests on AIX.

This patch builds CHICKEN using gcc.  It had been suggested to try
using clang, but I don't get the impression that LLVM builds on AIX:

http://llvm.org/bugs/buglist.cgi?quicksearch=aix

I may try again later using IBM's XL C compiler.  It seems that using
gcc on AIX is very common, especially amongst open-source
aficionados, and so that effort might not reach our target audience
anyway.

More immediately, I'd like to use salmonella to test out all of the
eggs and figure out what can be done to get more of those to build on
AIX.  Building salmonella was a snap, so there are no worries there.

I had previously mentioned that the html-tags and stty eggs don't
work.  I also couldn't get the xlib egg to build.  I haven't run into
any others yet.  But salmonella will find them!

The attached patch was based against

commit dc071fbae201f2b8db5539fd016c0d51be0bbe15
Author: Peter Bex <address@hidden>
Date:   Mon Oct 21 22:15:29 2013 +0200

which is what 'master' is currently pointing to as of this writing.

-- 
Erik Falor                                       http://unnovative.net
Registered Linux User #445632                  http://linuxcounter.net

0001-Add-support-for-AIX.patch
Description: Text Data

signature.asc
Description: Digital signature