Jeez, these all sound like really great suggestions. 
Is there a person or persons with the
expertise/authority to step up and make a desision on
some of these outstanding AIX issues?

I'm willing to step up to help write patches, etc. as
time permits.  Is there a description of how to submit
such items?

-Peter

--- Michael <macallan18@earthlink.net> wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> >> I'm fooling around with pkgsrc on AIX 4.3.2 for a
> while now and got
> >> quite a lot of things to work ( usually with some
> hacking ) - is there
> >> a mailing list specific to pkgsrc/AIX? On
> netbsd.org or pkgsrc.org I
> >> couldn't find one.
> >
> > No - tech-pkg@NetBSD.org is fine!
> > (pkgsrc.org is right now mostly an alias for
> NetBSD.org ...)
> 
> ok :)
> 
> The biggest problem on AIX is libtool ( in my
> opinion at least ) - to 
> get things linked it usually just allows unresolved
> symbols which leads 
> to segmentation faults because by default AIX
> doesn't do any real 
> runtime linking - it only resolves symbols in the
> main binary and hopes 
> that no lib has unresolved symbols. Enabling the
> runtime linker 
> (-Wl,-brtl on all binaries and libs) doesn't solve
> all problems, 
> sometimes it just doesn't find symbols defined in
> other libs, so we 
> should better make sure that all libraries are
> always fully linked (or 
> at least make the linker barf on unresolved symbols
> by setting 
> -Wl,-bernotok, that's still better than random
> segfaults ) - that's 
> nearly always possible, the only exceptions are
> modules that import 
> symbols from the main binary. Since I'm absolutely
> no expert on libtool 
> and friends I'm posting some thoughts here :)
> In my opinion we should:
> - never blindly set -Wl,-berok on any binary because
> that enables 
> unresolved symbols which nearly always leads to
> segfaults (libtool does 
> that...)
> - always set -Wl,-brtl and/or -Wl,-brtllib to enable
> the runtime linker 
> ( only really needed for loadable modules but it
> doesn't hurt either )
> - probably add -Wl,-bbigtoc to enable more than 16k
> symbols ( some libs 
> need that )
> - prevent stripping of certain binaries ( and add
> -Wl,-bexpall to 
> export all symbols) that use modules which rely on
> symbols from the 
> main binary, like xmms for instance.
> With this and some hacking ( mainly adding -lthis
> -lthat and so on ) I 
> was able to get gtk 1 and 2, xfce4, gaim and a bunch
> of other things to 
> work ( gnome2 doesn't work yet - programs hang in
> libbonobo for some 
> reason, right now I'm hacking mozilla. The official
> binaries need AIX 
> 4.3.3 and just segfault on my box )
> 
> To help resolving library dependencies ( libtool is
> no real help there 
> ) I wrote two small python scripts - one that reads
> the symbol tables 
> of all libraries it encounters and feeds them into a
> database and 
> another that queries the database for symbol names
> and tells you which 
> lib(s) export matching symbols ( not perfect but
> still better than 
> grepping libraries... )
> and...
> - pkgsrc should install install-sh on AIX too, AIX's
> install doesn't 
> understand some command line options that other
> programs frequently use
> - use gawk, gm4 and so on whenever possible, AIX's
> versions are either 
> broken or too old
> - avoid AIX's indent - it crashes if input gets too
> big
> - maybe set MOTIFBASE=/usr/dt - can't think of any
> good reason to use 
> lesstif or OpenMotif on AIX, IBM's motif seems to be
> pretty ok.
> 
> that's it for now
> 
> have fun
> Michael
> 
> 


		
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