On 1/7/2013 6:47 AM, Daniel Stenberg wrote:
> On Sun, 6 Jan 2013, John E. Malmberg wrote:
>
>> The existing config-vms.h differs from one generated by the configure
>> script on AXP/VMS 8.4 by over 100 entries or omissions.
>
> AFAIK config-vms.h was always manually created and an omission would
> just equal not being defined and that should be fine for missing features.
>
> We of course welcome patches that fix flaws! I don't think we have a
> very big user base on VMS.

There seems to be about 3 or so of VMS people doing occasional builds of
curl and posting binaries. An unknown number of people are using those
binaries or building their own.

I need libcurl as a shared library to get "git" to build on VMS, so I
need a more functional port than the others.

> As you can run configure, config-vms.h shouldn't be needed/used in the
> first place!

VMS can only run configure on two of the three VMS platforms and then
only if the optional GNV package is installed. And the GNV package
needs to be manually updated with the newer Bash 4.2.39, which just
became available last month.

And right now, we can not fully trust configure, because some of its
tests will always fail on VMS for various reasons unless we use some
special hacks to trick configure into giving the right answer.

It also takes about an hour to run configure. Most of that appears to
be in SED, which indicates that the VMS port needs a tweak, which I have
not had time to chase down.

And right now, people knowing how to do those hacks is a skill in short
supply on VMS. I am trying to supply some documentation on this.

http://sourceforge.net/p/vms-ports/wiki/GeneratingConfigh/

And it is hard for VMS programmers to figure out why some of the
configure tests are failing. For example, AFAIK, VMS uses MIT Kerberos,
yet configure is reporting that it is detecting HEIMDAL instead.

I would like to eventually get the files needed to use GNV to configure
and build curl into the packages/vms directory.

So for some packages like Curl, we need to also be able to build it
using native VMS tools. And I am also looking at what it will take to
get the VMS native tools to do a better job than they are currently
doing at building curl.

Since the VMS native tools were already unable to build curl, I figured
that this was the also the time to start refactoring out as much VMS
specific code from the common curl code as could be done with out having
to worry about doing more damage to the VMS native build, and then I can
fix the build using the Native tools.

Regards,
-John
wb8tyw_at_qsl.net

-------------------------------------------------------------------
List admin: http://cool.haxx.se/list/listinfo/curl-library
Etiquette: http://curl.haxx.se/mail/etiquette.html
Received on 2013-01-07