Solaris 2.6: Compile of octave 2.1.33

[Trond Varslot]

I have been working a bit with getting octave 2.1.33 to compile and run
on Solaris 2.6/SunOS 5.6. It failed with the same kind of error messages
I have found posted on these mailing-lists earlier. My first thought was
that the errormessage 'unrecognized option -rdynamic' was significant.
It turns out that it was not. It was rather unfortunate though, that
this error message was printed just before the compilation stopped.

Here are my thoughts on this problem:
The standard solaris linker does by default include all the symbols,
which is what we want to accomplish with -rdynamic. Hence the gcc
compiler does behave a little bit differently and does not support
-rdynamic. If gcc was set up to use the gnu linker, we could instead use
-Wl-export-dynamic, to obtain the same result. The option is however
redundant with Suns linker.

The configure script does not recognize that -rdynamic is not supported
because this does not produce a compilation error. The test for options
will not detect a nonexistent option unless the compiler returns an
error, which gcc does not for nonexistant options. Just try
gcc -foo testfile.c && echo "I am compiled!". If testfile.c compiles
without the option, it will most certainly compile with the unsupportes
option. The compiler will still print an error message though.

The solution to all my problems turned out to be to upgrade gnu make to
a newer version. I started out with make-3.77, with which octave did not
compile. However, upgrading to make-3.79.1 octave compiled and runs like
a charm. The compiler still complains about unsupported options, but
continues compiling the whole code without having to manually edit
Makeconf or any of the other hand tailoring of confituration files which
have been suggested.

I hope this can help someone which are experiencing the same problems I
had.

Yours sincerely
Trond Varslot.



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