Hello!

On Sun, 22 Aug 2004 14:16:40 -0400
Michael <macallan18@earthlink.net> wrote:

> Since building gcc on my box takes bloody ages ( well, actually it's 
> the configure script for the C++ library which bogs everything down, 
> not the compiler which is pretty speedy ) I don't know if my gcc hack 
> works - I'll know tomorrow or so, hopefully.

The libstdc++ configure script seems to use -g3 and I suspect this
might or might not be the reason for it to "crawl" but it writes
continuously to the disk for a loooong time with almost zero cpu
load so that it took more than 9 hours to compile gcc 3.3.4 on a
powerful chirp box that has couple of gigs of memory and 10000rpm
disks.

As the netbsd pkgsrc bootstrap failed on AIX 5.2 (PR#26730), I tried
to compile the usual GNU(ish) opensource packages by hand. Now this
was a pain in the ass indeed... Of course the worst of all was the
shared library problem. Libtool and configure scripts either do not
handle the situation at all, or, in case of some packages, they produce
shared .a libraries. After several days of struggle I actually gave
up compiling my usual toolset I was able to compile within 1-2 days
on Solaris, IRIX, HP-UX, and Tru64 already (with couple of code tweaks
and minor script/makefile hacks here and there). I'm maybe too lame,
but AIX is evil!

So it would be very nice to have a fully working pkgsrc on AIX as the
AIX binary opensource repositories are lagged far behind the current
software versions (IBM offers gcc 2.95.x and apache 1.3.x instead
of gcc 3.x and apache 2.x for example) so that - in my opinion -
AIX usability based on opensource is very limited, and pkgsrc
could be the savior here, for me at least.

Regards,

Szabolcs