>OpenSolaris currently requires that you build it on a version of Solaris
>that is very close to the version that you are building. E.g. you can't
>build OpenSolaris on Solaris 9 (or even early releases of Solaris 10.)
>
>I believe that the primary reason for this is differences in system
>headers and libraries that the compilers are being pointed to.
The build is supposed to be self-contained; we don't link against libc
other than in the proto area and we don't use headers outside the
proto area.
There are, however, a few exceptions: bits not in "ON" and some
other bits used by the compiler:
- XML and other libraries
- linker
>Back while at Sun, I worked with some unbundled projects that had
>similar OS dependencies, and I found that it was not very hard to use
>-YI, -YP, and such to convince a recent compiler to build our product
>using the "right" headers from a proto area instead of the versions that
>were on my build host. (This let us have a single build server which
>could build versions of our software for Solaris 2.6, 7, and 8 at the
>time. And yes, there were big differences due to headers and
>libraries. It was ugly software, and I don't want to elaborate on it
>further other than to point out that it _can_ be done.)
My experience is that the headers are certainly mostly picked from the
right spot; when we find that it is not the case we fix it.
>Has anyone given any thought to convincing OpenSolaris to use its own
>proto area (populated by the install_h target or somesuch) instead of
>assuming local system headers?
It already should; anything that doesn't is broken.
>What about libraries? Startup code? Tools?
>Are there other dependencies I'm missing?
Depenencies on stuff not being build.
>And, briefly, while on the subject, has anyone in the compilers group
>considered adding support for cross-compilation? (It would be nice to
>be able to cross build for a variety of reasons, not least of which is
>that my Opteron system is a lot faster and has local disks relative to
>the Sun Blade 100 that I am currently using for building for SPARC
>software. :-)
There were cross compilers at some time (sun3/sun4 era)
Casper
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