Subject: Problems compiling pine 3.91 with gcc on Sol 2.3.

From: [email-masked] (Thomas Richard Stevenson)
Date: Mon, 13 Mar 95 16:21:19 GMT

I just got done compiling pine 3.91 using gcc on Sol 2.3. This was one of
the biggest pains I've been through! First of all, none of the makefiles, or the
build script was set up for gcc, so I had to make many changes to get it to
compile. Second, the source code has hard code path locations (/usr/local/...)
all over the place, and we install code in locations other than in /usr/local, so I
had to make changes for that.

I've been installing programs for Unix for about 6 years now,  and I've never
had to make so many changes to makefiles and source code as I did with pine!
There isn't any reason why pine has to have these problems! gcc is a popular
cc compiler, so I don't know why it wasn't set up for it. And why would anyone
hard code path locations in a program?

pine is nice, but I'm not sure if it is worth all of the problems (when new versions
come out). If anyone is thinking about making any new changes to pine, I would
suggest making it more portable. Maybe using Configure or IMakefiles and removing
the hard coded path locations.

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From: Brian Tao <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 15 Mar 1995 22:22:02 +0000 ()

On Mon, 13 Mar 1995, Thomas Richard Stevenson wrote:
> 
> I just got done compiling pine 3.91 using gcc on Sol 2.3. This was one
> of the biggest pains I've been through!

    Have you tried building TeX/LaTeX2e/xdvi/dvips with the kpathsea
library from scratch yet?  ;-)

> First of all, none of the makefiles, or the build script was set up
> for gcc, so I had to make many changes to get it to compile.

    Pine should stick with a top-level Makefile that passes CC,
CFLAGS, LDFLAGS, etc. down to the lower Makefiles.  Making a single
change in ./Makefile then propagates down to imapd, pico, pine, etc.

> Second, the source code has hard code path locations (/usr/local/...)
> all over the place, and we install code in locations other than in
> /usr/local, so I had to make changes for that.

    Examples?  I grepped through *.[ch] in the pine/ subdirectory and
didn't find any occurrences of "/usr/local" that specified a pathname,
except in os.h.  There are four hits in helptext.c and two in init.c,
none of which affect where Pine looks for support files.

> pine is nice, but I'm not sure if it is worth all of the problems
> (when new versions come out). If anyone is thinking about making any
> new changes to pine, I would suggest making it more portable. Maybe
> using Configure or IMakefiles and removing the hard coded path
> locations.

    I might compile 3.91 on our Solaris 2.4 system some time soon, if
the real admin doesn't get around to updating it from 3.89.  I'll post
about any problems I encounter.
--
Brian ("Though this be madness, yet there is method in't") Tao
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