On Thu, Nov 17, 2005 at 01:28:16PM +0000, segv@netctl.net wrote:

> Greetings, I'm sure there are quite a few people on this list who use pkgsrc on
> Solaris. Now that Solaris and Sun Studio 11 are free, it would be nice to
> enhance pkgsrc for this platform. What I mean by that is not simply doing bulk
> builds (anyone can do that) but finding broken packages and fixing them.
> 
> I notice that there are a lot of packages that break due to:
> 
> 1. Different operating system environment
> 2. Different compiler environment (sunpro)
> 
> In fact, packages that happily compile with gcc, fail to compile with sunpro
> compiler. Sun compilers are good and produce faster code, so I think it's
> important to fix packages that have been "hardcoded" for gcc, or at least nag
> the original developers to streamline their code.

this is a fact of life when dealing with (badly written/non-portable)
open source software. there are some tricks that pkgsrc does to make
things more "gcc-like" (or "gcc-compatible"), within reason.

basically, at this stage, anything that does not build with Sun Studio
is likely to require manual hacking to make it work.

there are a number of us which work on pkgsrc/Solaris (myself
included), but I admit I have had little time for pkgsrc hacking in
the last little while..

grant.