[rescue] compiling old software re: emacs on SunOS 4.1.4

[Doug McIntyre]

On Tue, May 29, 2018 at 09:06:25AM -0400, john wrote:
> So my question is: Is it possible that when I try to compile what 
> purports to be 1995 vintage code, someone has doctored up the 
> configuration files to expect a more modern environment?B  For example, I 
> was able to get GMAKE compiled, but then it didn't like my SED, and so I 
> tried updating SED and ran into other things it didn't like. It looked 
> like an endless treasure hunt. I gave up.

As long as you get old enough distributions of the stock GNU code
bases, yes, you should be able to expect it to configure, compile and
run on SunOS v4.1.4 quite handily. 

For quite some time, I would consider SunOS 4.1.4 the "reference" platform
for any of the open source software.

After a while, when SunOS usage was on the decline, and linux was
taking over, many linux-isms started creeping into the software
distributions making it more difficult to do things on either SunOS
or Solaris. And eventually, GNU software started dropping any
sort of pretense for being able to compile on SunOS, and support for
compiling there was dropped out.

I would say that 90% of the code out there could still compile on
SunOS (assuming it isn't something that would have to dig into the
kernel, such as perhaps htop, or something of that nature), if you
knew the proper library incantantions (ie. -lnsl -lsocket -lresolv
will get you a long way to getting more things done, perhaps some of
the UCB stuff). 

> There is also the problem of patches and how far up one should bring a 
> system.B  I decided to patch up to 2000, among other things so DATE would 
> work right. I would think I could run into trouble trying to compile 
> 1995 code on a machine patched to 2000.

I doubt it. At worst you'll have things assuming they are say 1960 and
show up as 2060, or the funniest were things like 20160 or something like that.

But the compilation/library systems didn't change for y2k patching.
It was mostly assumptions based on a two digit year as to what century it was.