Re: gawk latest 3.1.3 build on SunOS 4.1.4

[Paul Eggert]

"Marchant, Stephen" <address@hidden> writes:

> So, it sounds like that GNU is no longer going to support SunOS any longer,

No, SunOS 4.x is still supported by most core GNU apps, though you
typically need to use GCC (or some other Standard C compiler) rather
than its bundled pre-standard 'cc'.  Admittedly the handwriting is on
the wall, though.  Hardly anybody uses SunOS 4.x any more, so I'd
expect that you'll run into inadvertant porting bugs if you install
newer GNU apps on SunOS 4.x.

> or that it's a pre-requisite to use the GNU libs as opposed to the OS
> stdlibs.?

The gnulib code that I was referring to is intended to be bundled with
GNU applications.  If you know what you're doing you can patch your
copy of the 'gawk' distribution to use those modules, and then 'gawk'
should build without those problems on your SunOS 4.1.4 host.
However, this is not for the average installer, and I mentioned those
modules more for the gawk maintainer's benefit than for yours.

It might save everybody some work if you simply installed an older
gawk, as SunOS 4.x was quite popular back in the mid 1990s.  I'd
suggest gawk 3.0.2 (dated 1996) or 3.0.6 (dated 2000).