One Night of Work -- carton 2007-01-14

It was a fantastic success!

Granted, we continue to have poor attendance. And the biggest lesson from One Night of Work is that three hours every two weeks is about one TENTH the time required to get the level of personal development I'd like in this hobby. But everyone who does attend seems to look forward to it rather than dread it.

Tonight was probably the least impressive One Night of Work accomplishment-wise for me. I got my PS1 shell prompt set on Solaris. I also got the PATH and MANPATH set, and started a pkgsrc build.

As usual it's all kind of a mess:

• bash doesn't respect $ENV. Every other POSIX shell does: pdksh, ksh93, Solaris (old) ksh, NetBSD sh, Solaris sh all work fine. In fact even bash works almost fine if you set $POSIXLY_CORRECT=y. The problem is, without NetBSD's lucky /etc/login.conf, I don't know how to set an environment variable before the login shell starts. Also, POSIXLY_CORRECT=y breaks pkgsrc.
• pkgsrc bootstrap doesn't respect PKGSRC_COMPILER in /etc/mk.conf if gcc exists in the search path. If you wish to use SunPro compilers, you must remove /usr/sfw/bin and anywhere else gcc exists from the PATH.
• pkgsrc with gcc 3.4 is slow because gcc should not be used on SPARC. pkgsrc with Sun's gcc 4.0 frankencompiler (gcc front-end, SunPro backend) has some cryptic error compiling Perl and won't bootstrap. pkgsrc with SunPro has mad broken packages, like some sort of libtool problem with libtiff.
• pkgsrc (and most of Solaris, believe it or not!) is not 64-bit on Sun's ubiquitous 64-bit platforms. Complicated tricks are required to get 64-bit packages. Also, on Solaris, the 64-bit ABI implies non-executable stack. The 32-bit ABI has an executable stack by default unless you set an /etc/system variable. so...you really do want to use 64-bit.

Now I see why I put this off until forced to do it. meh.