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

[Jonathan Patschke]

On Tue, 29 May 2018, 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.

For a while, GNU unofficially stood for "Get New Utilities" for that just
reason.

Back in the late 1990s, it was common to have a completely separate
userland utility/library tree just for GNU compatibility.  /opt/fsf is a
pretty good place to put it.  I could probably dig up my build notes from
back then (mentioning which order to build things, which configure option
to pass, etc.), but they'd target Solaris 2.6 rather than SunOS 4.1.4.

I still "get" to maintain one of these at the day job for our HP-UX 10
machines.  There are inherent limitations to how modern the tools can be
when the kernel and libc and toolchain[0] are so ancient, but I was very
happy the day that I got GCC 5.2 working on it so that I could have almost
all[1] of C++14 at my command.


[0] Many of the 'binutils' tools don't support HP-UX 10, so we're stuck
     with the many bugs and limitations in HP's ld, for instance.
[1] Forget about std::thread or Unicode support.  HP-UX 10 still uses
     "green" threads with some *really* weird semantics.
-- 
Jonathan Patschke
Austin, TX
USA