Problems on Irix 6.3: libffi won't work

[Benedikt Stefansson]

Ye hivemeisters,

I've just changed working environment from LA to Trento, Italy for the
next three months. Must get Swarm to work on Irix 6.3 SGIs which is what

this place depends on. If not I'm in big trouble.

Now I've wasted the last three days on trying to install all the
required software for Swarm-1.1, on an SGI O2 with Irix 6.3. Getting
GCC 2.8.1 to work took two days, until we discoved this document thanks
to Ariel Faigon at Silicon Graphics:

    http://www-it.et.tudelft.nl/~erik/gcc/

With that in hand GCC 2.8.1 and libc++2.8.1 finally compiled. Now I've
compiled tcl8.1a2, tk8.1a2 and blt8.0-unoff (the last one was of course
the hardest part and needed and endless number of arbitrary hacks and
tricks). Also compiled tclobjc-1.3.

The problem is with libffi-1.17. The ./configure and Makefiles cause
nothing but grief,  they try to link against the old Irix binaries (o32)

all the time. Took me about 5 hours of endless hacking to finally get
this to (seemingly) compile.

The Swarm libraries compile without as much as a single complaint, and
after mucking about with the Makefile.conf for several hours heatbugs
also compiles with some minor complaints about some symbols in the
Archiver (?) - but when I try to run heatbugs I end up with this:
  4398:./heatbugs: rld: Error: unresolvable symbol in
/usr/local/lib/libffi.so: ffi_call_N32
  4398:./heatbugs: rld: Fatal Error: this executable has unresolvable
symbols

There is a mention in the Makefile.conf  that libffi died in Irix 5.3
when Marcus created the binary for that version - please, please
Marcus: what was the remedy? And no, I can't use the binary version
since the toolchain (beginning with GCC 2.8.1) is all dependent on the
n32 binaries but the Irix5.3 binary is o32.

Finally, I just have to urge you guys to consider how frustrating it is
that there is no documentation on the website about the necessary
software - for example nary a word about what's up with libffi and
ffcall.  I'm stumped.

Best regards,
-Benedikt








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