OT: SCO Forum

[Bill Campbell]

On Thu, Jun 22, 2006, Fairlight wrote:
>Confusious (Bill Campbell) say:
...
>> I'm certainly no stranger to building open source software on SCO systems.
>> My site, ftp.celestial.com, was considered the definitive source for
>> compiled open source for SCO systems for years, and was the first reference
>> on the SCO site for this type of thing.  Given Stallman's penchant for
>> relating things to GNU, perhaps I was running GNU/Xenix and GNU/OpenServer.
>> 
>> I even have some RPM packages for OpenServer there.
>
>I'm not saying it can't be done.  I utilised your resources extensively for
>a long time when I had to deal with SCO boxen, until you pretty much moved
>to linux yourself and things slowed down a lot with new ports.  Which,
>hey...no complaints about it stopping as it was a generous resource for
>which you asked nothing.

I always have figured that part of my contribution to open source projects
was making things available like that.  Everything on our site is/was
things that we use ourselves and at our customer's sites.

I have to say that people in OldSCO always made sure I had any software I
wanted for in-house use and development.  Bringing this back slightly on-
topic, SCO comp'ed my trips to SCOForum as well, I just had to provide
transportation (I had to have my car so I could provide interesting rides
for Bob Stockler :-).

>I gotta ask, since you've done so much porting to SCO though:  Was it not
>far more painful than porting to many other *nix OS's?

Building for OpenServer has gotten easier over the years, but I did have to
make numerous hacks when I was building packages for OpenPKG Release 2.3 in
late 2003.  If I remember correctly, one of the main issues that kept
coming up was related to the libintl internationalization.

Probably the most difficult system I've had to work with was an old Sequent
Dynix/PTX system where their C compiler didn't support ANSI C prototypes,
and there was no gcc port available.  The first thing I had to do was hack
gcc to get it to build with their compiler.  Once I had gcc working, the
rest of the porting wasn't all that difficult.  This was about ten years
ago, a time when would have thought all Unix C compilers would be ANSI
compliant, much less Sequent's since they had a reputation for being
leading edge with their symmetric multiprocessing which I first had hands-
on in 1985.

>> I took the time to get the OpenPKG portable package managment system
>> Release 1.3 working on OpenServer several years ago.   I have 167 packages
>> built for OSR 5.0.6a including perl-5.8.0, python-2.2.2, mysql-3.23.56,
>> postfix-2.0.3, openssh-3.6.1p2, etc. -- basically most of the tools I use
>> daily.  It works well enough for my needs so I'm not taking the time to
>> bring them up to date (I'll spend my time on the OS X version first :-).
>
>I've got perl's 5.8.1 on a few systems.  They have a 5.8.4 but the
>prerequisite packages do some not-so-nice things to the systems involved.
>It didn't play well with others.  And try getting SCO's releases working on
>an older server like 5.0.4.  I have people ask for that (or even 5.0.2),
>and some of that is just not going to happen.  As with fP, people were slow
>to upgrade SCO releases unless they needed something--and even if they did.
>Can't blame them at those prices, either.
>
>Now...can anyone take your perl 5.8.0 and install, eh...Crypt::SSLeay, or
>XML::Parser...any XS modules, really?  Does it actually load them?  If so,
>your builds are better than SCO's own.

You would have to install the OpenPKG packages (I can supply an ISO with
binaries and an install script).  I have those perl packages as well as a
few hundred others.  I haven't used them all, but I haven't had any that
don't work.

FWIW:  This version of OpenPKG has gcc-3.3.  The version in OpenPKG 2.3
which we're running on our in-house FreeBSD system is gcc-3.4.2 while our
OpenPKG Release 2.5 uses gcc-4.0.3.  Each OpenPKG Release is well tested
with a particular version of gcc, perl, Berkeley DB, etc.  The software
I've developed builds and runs well on any of these versions, probably
because I tend to avoid non-portable ``features''.

Once the OpenPKG packages are installed, building additional packages is
fairly easy, other than having to deal with SCOisms that haven't been
handled yet.

Bill
--
INTERNET:   bill at Celestial.COM  Bill Campbell; Celestial Software, LLC
URL: http://www.celestial.com/  PO Box 820; 6641 E. Mercer Way
FAX:            (206) 232-9186  Mercer Island, WA 98040-0820; (206) 236-1676

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