HP-UX port of Sage - issues arrising from such an attempt.

[sagetrac-drkirkby]

I think it would be useful if we could get an HP-UX port of Sage. Mathematica used to support HP-UX until quite recently, but no longer does. However, as of today (6th October 2009) an HP-UX port is clearly of low-priority compared to issues with OS X 10.6, Solaris, Windows and Cygwin.

Having just done a fresh install of HP-UX on my HP Visulize C3600 which is fitted with a pair of 36 GB SCSI disks and 1 GB RAM (soon to be upgraded to 8 GB).

# uname -a
HP-UX hpbox B.11.11 U 9000/785 2016698240 unlimited-user license

I thought I'd document the issues one would get from a totally fresh install. It should be noted that the C3600 uses the PA-RISC processor, not the Intel Itanium which has been used on all HP's machines running HP-UX since the end of 2008.

As and when bugs are found which would prevent Sage building on HP-UX, the trac numbers will be added here.

• The C compiler supplied with HP-UX is not fully functional, and is only intended to rebuild the kernel. As such, it would be useless for building Sage. Commercial compilers are available from HP.
• gcc is not supplied with HP-UX, but can be downloaded free from various sites. When I checked, the HP website the latest available gcc was version 4.4.0, which is quite up to date (the very latest is 4.4.1). In order to download gcc from the HP site, you need to join HP's Developer & Solution Partner Program (DSPP), but that is free for individual users at least. However, the gcc from HP was configured only for C and C++, so one would need to build gcc oneself to include Fortran support, or find a binary for gcc where Fortran support is included.
• On PA 11.11 systems, the linker patch PHSS_33033 is required to compile C++ programs with gcc.
• By default, /home, where user's home directories resides is limited to about 20 MB or so. This needed to be expanded using /usr/sbin/sam
• Install a suitable version of GNU make. Currently Sage would try to build with the version of make in HP-UX, but it would fail. Due to bug We must check if the version of 'tar' found is gnu tar #7142, no checks are made that the version of make found is the GNU make
• Install a suitable version of GNU tar. Currently Sage would try to build with the version of tar in HP-UX, but it would fail. Due to bug We must check if the version of 'make' found is gnu 'make' #7143, no checks are made that the version of tar found is the GNU tar
• prereq-0.4 has a minor portability issue #7156 causes an error message, as the -p option is not supported on HP-UX. In practice, the fix is trivual and would not in itself present a problem to building Sage on HP-UX.
• HP-UX failure of libm4ri 20090617 as it attempts to find L1 cache size #7171 M4RI configure script aborts when it tries to find the cache size.

Dave

CC: @sagetrac-drkirkby @dimpase

Component: porting: AIX or HP-UX

Reviewer: Dima Pasechnik

Issue created by migration from https://trac.sagemath.org/ticket/7140

[mkoeppe]

comment:7

outdated, should be closed

[dimpase]

Reviewer: Dima Pasechnik