Re: How can I test if the GNU or Sun linker is used?

[Dr. David Kirkby]

Bob Friesenhahn wrote:
> On Sun, 9 Aug 2009, Dr. David Kirkby wrote:
> > I can see your point. At the moment, there is no effort at all to 
> > support any operating system that does not Sun or GNU compilers. i.e. 
> > nobody is making any effort at all to support HP-UX, AIX, tru64 etc.
>
> A shame!  I certainly make sure that all of these are supported by my 
> own software.  Other than gaining access to a system, it is not 
> particularly difficult for well designed software.
>
> Bob
> --
> Bob Friesenhahn
> address@hidden, http://www.simplesystems.org/users/bfriesen/
> GraphicsMagick Maintainer,    http://www.GraphicsMagick.org/

I agree. I've had one of my own programs http://atlc.sourceforge.net/ on 
a large range of platforms. To quote from the web page:

"In addition to the the commmon Linux PC, atlc has been tested on a Sony 
Playstation 2 as well as the Cray YMP-EL supercomputer, which is 
available for free public access at Cray-Cyber network. It has also been 
tested on Debian Linux, Slackware Linux, Gentoo Linux, Redhat  Linux, 
Suse Linux, IBM's AIX, Apples's OS X for Mac, HP's HP-UX (both PA-RISC 
and Itanium), SGI's IRIX, Sun's Solaris, SCO's UNIXWare, HP's Tru64, 
Cray's UNICOS, NetBSD, OpenBSD and FreeBSD."

However, unless there is someone with access to an HP-UX box, and is 
interested in helping develop Sage on HP-UX, it is just not going to 
happen. I have machines at home capable of running Solaris (both SPARC 
and x86), tru64, AIX, HP-UX and IRIX. But I've no inclination to use any 
of the other operating systems - for one the machines are too old.

The problem is, if we started from scratch, I'm sure with an eye to 
portability, we could have made Sage very portable. But making use of 
existing software means you are reliant on what others have done before 
you. Given there is probably a hundred plus man-years gone into the 
development of the software Sage uses, it's not practical to rewrite 
everything from scratch.

I'd love to see a port to HP-UX, where I know at least one person is 
interested in Mathematical software, but the userbase is not large. 
Wolfram Research gave up development on AIX and IRIX many years ago, and 
HP-UX more recently.


dave