Hello,

I wanted to download the latest freepascal for Sparc Solaris .

Issue 1:
Opened the http://www.freepascal.org/download.var , clicked on the "SPARC Solaris" link.
It opened the page for selecting the mirror.
Clicked on Sourceforge , which lead to :
http://sourceforge.net/projects/freepascal/files/

The problem here is that this page doesn't seem to contain any Solaris stuff .

Issue 2:
I went back to the mirror selection, and clicked on ftp.freepascal.org . This link is ok , but it contains the 2.4.2 sparc solaris FPC .

This is not consistent with the main download page (http://www.freepascal.org/download.var) , which implies that 2.6.0 is available for the entire list of platforms and operating systems (which includes the SPARC solaris ... ).

Perhaps it's worth taking a look at the download page , so that it presents in a clearer way which FPC version is available for each platform ? For example create a separate section for the less-supported platforms. The way it is now, it implies that 2.6 is available for all the platforms - which is unfortunately false.

I currently have ssh access to some Sparc Solaris servers. Does it involve a lot of work to create the solaris builds ?

Best regards,
Adrian M

I don't know to what extent anybody is routinely producing Solaris/SPARC releases. I try to test the compiler on v10 (and to a limited extent on v8) on a fairly regular basis, but I started off with [checks] 2.4.2, had to do a bit of hacking to get it installed (see http://mantis.freepascal.org/view.php?id=18271) and then compiled newer versions from there.

In practical terms, you might need to be on 2.7 since there are a couple of code generation bugs that weren't backported to 2.6- this affects both Solaris and Linux. Lazarus 0.9.30-fixed should compile and run on v10 now that some alignment patches have been incorporated.

In all cases, you need the freeware gas, gld, gmake and probably gtar etc., and need to be careful with your paths.

The server is a SunOS 5.10 . Uname -a :
SunOS bebrxsu005 5.10 Generic_147440-07 sun4u sparc SUNW,SPARC-Enterprise Solaris

I'll try to find some time for installing the 2.4.2 and building the 2.6. Thanks for the link : the comments will be useful in case i encounter problems .

In practical terms, you might need to be on 2.7 since there are a couple of code generation bugs that weren't backported to 2.6- this affects both Solaris and Linux. Lazarus 0.9.30-fixed should compile and run on v10 now that some alignment patches have been incorporated.

I am hoping that 2.6 would be enough (not targetting lazarus) . Compiling a development version would be painful because there is no way to directly access the svn server ...

In all cases, you need the freeware gas, gld, gmake and probably gtar etc., and need to be careful with your paths.

The server has the GNU make and tar . But the as and ld are not GNU. And i have no admin rights : so i can install software only in the home dir.

If you get stuck having a copy of my fpc.cfg might help. Email me in the address in my sig (below), I'll be at my desk intermittently.

But you should still be able to get a snapshot of the development version. However you might find you have to work in a progression: 2.4.2 (possibly via 2.4.4) to 2.6.0 to 2.7.1. The issues are in floating point and variant handling, you'll see them on Mantis if you look for SPARC.

I'd have thought that would have been OK, once you'd got paths set up. If you have problems use the compiler's -vt switch, since this will give you a blow-by-blow account of what's being looked for:

gmake NOGDB=1 OPT='-O- -gl -vt' all

Note that there are some things that I haven't tested. For example, on various Linux targets I've got a (Lazarus) app that uses PostgreSQL's listen/notify with a lot of pointer checks etc... I've never looked at that on either Solaris or Windows (which isn't where I want to go today).