[geeks] galeon Doesn't Suck that much....

[Greg A. Woods]

[ On Saturday, April 13, 2002 at 22:00:27 (+0200), jkunz at unixag-kl.fh-kl.de wrote: ]
> Subject: Re: [geeks] galeon Doesn't Suck that much....
>
> Made this experience the hard way. I build GNOME on my Alpha running
> Tru64 UNIX using the Comcrap compiler.
> A non i386, non 32 bit, non glibc, non gcc, non ...
> In short: A non Linux system. 
> It was a PITA. Worked only after a big "GNUification". gmake, 
> auto-everything, GNU M4, ...

It sounds like what you did would better be called "porting", not "building".  :-)

As such if you didn't start out by getting all the requisite development
tools running in the new environment then you're also going to end up
re-engineering a good chunk of the configuration and build systems too.
Since the dawn of GNU Autoconf not so many people do real porting any
more, and even back before Autoconf it seemed like the skills for doing
porting were not really all that widely known.

I think if you'd done much the same (though started with GNU Make, GNU
Auto-*, etc., etc., all installed and tested and working fine) on any
other 32-bit Unix then you'd have been fine, and may not even have had
to do any porting at all (which should mean you could do without the
auto* tools and their dependencies, though I personally would never
recommend trying that on the first attempt unless you've got time so
spend on such and experiment and you don't mind starting over :-).
There's a (maybe not so) surprising amount of code out there that still
exhibits surprising bugs on real 64-bit machines like the Alpha.  Every
time I contemplate putting an Alpha in a production environment (running
NetBSD of course) I read about a critical bug in some application I
would have needed.  (Which isn't to say that aren't applications which
work very well on Alphas -- there certainly are!)

I.e. the GNOME libraries and GTK+ build fine for sparc with NetBSD libc,
and I think it builds fine with several other non-GCC ANSI compilers
(eg. SunPro C), and I know it builds on Solaris on sparc.

> I still get scrambled bitmap images (like the icons in menu bars and
> buttons, jpg's in mozilla/galeon). I suspect the DEC Xserver.

Either that or some 64-bit problem in the graphics libraries....  :-)

-- 
								Greg A. Woods

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