Re: Building m4 on BSDI 4.0.1

[Chris McGuire]

At 07:23 PM 12/12/2006, you wrote:
>Chris McGuire <address@hidden> writes:
>
>> To get m4 to build on my old BSDI 4.0.1 machine
>
>Hmm, that's software from a company (BSDI) that exists no longer.  And
>the company's successor (Wind River Systems) discontinued support for
>BSD/OS at the end of 2004.  Our usual rule is to not worry about
>platforms that the original supplier no longer supports, but in some
>cases we make exceptions.  Are you actively using this machine in
>production, or is this more of a computer-museum situation?

Unfortunately, it's a a very active web hosting server. The customers on
there will be moved someday, but for now, it chugs right along.


>Anyway, if it is a production machine and if you have an obvious fix
>it might be nice to fix this in m4 and/or gnulib.

I do not have an obvious fix. As I indicated in my original e-mail, I'm a total
hacker... but I've hacked for a long time. So I can usually make things work but
not always understand exactly why they work.


>Is there some simple test program that illustrates the bug in wchar.h?
>(I am assuming there is a bug there somewhere.)

There are many references in the m4 files to this bug, it just seems that BSDI 
4.0.1 is not
found to need the bug fix that is apparently provided. For example, on line 
13198 in the file
'configure' of the m4 v1.4.8 source it states:

/* BSD/OS 4.1 has a bug: <stdio.h> and <time.h> must be included before 
<wchar.h>.  */

Now, BSDI 4.0.1 is not exactly BSD/OS 4.1, but it is pretty close. And with 
such an obvious
reference to wchar.h, I assume we are talking about the same problem.

But I guess configure doesn't recognize BSDI 4.0.1 as needing this fix and it 
isn't done.

Again, please don't trash me with the "You so stupid" talk [think Weird Al's 
UHF]. I'm just trying my best
to inform you guys and hopefully somebody will go "Ahhhhhhh" and see the 
problem.

I've ended up being able to build several other packages by making the OS's 
wchar.h unavailable while I run  configure (like the newest Bison v2.3 for 
example). So I suspect that it is just a matter of configure not applying 
changes it would make to BSD/OS 4.1 to my BSDI 4.0.1 box.

Who knows? :)

Again, if there is more info I can supply to help, please ask.


Thanks,
Chris