I have created a mailing list, mozilla-irix@netscape.com, for discussing Irix issues . Note that this is not an official Mozilla.org list at this point. To subscribe, send mail to mozilla-irix-request@netscape.com with "subscribe" in the body of the message. If that doesn't work, mail akkana@netscape.com and I'll add you manually.

The Autoconf Build

December 7 Update: we're there! It builds!
The AC_C_INLINE has been removed from configure.in, all the static_casts and such have been found and changed to NS_STATIC_CAST and similar macros, and the NULLs in nsISupports.h have been changed to a more C++-legal 0.

Unfortunately it crashes on startup -- looks like another static initializer problem.

Autoconf/Gtk build requirements

0. Environment Variables
Tell configure to use the native development tools:

setenv CC cc
setenv CXX CC
setenv LD CC
setenv NSPR_OPTIONS NS_USE_NATIVE=1

1. autoconf
You will need autoconf, GNU m4, and texinfo (these links courtesy of Victor Riley of SGI):

ftp://ftp.uu.net/archive/systems/gnu/texinfo-3.9.tar.gz

ftp://ftp.uu.net/archive/systems/gnu/m4-1.4.tar.gz

ftp://ftp.uu.net/archive/systems/gnu/autoconf-2.12.tar.gz

just unpack them run ./configure; make; make install to build and install them. I built them in /MozROOT so that I could package that into a tar file and give to others trying to build this without requiring them to do this all over again.

Automake, ftp://ftp.uu.net/archive/systems/gnu/automake-1.3.tar.gz, was another package that was up there that might help.

Also the documentation on autoconfig will be useful - http://www.lns.cornell.edu/public/COMP/info/autoconf/autoconf_toc.html.

2. gtk
The autoconf build uses gtk by default. It is recommended that you use gtk instead of Motif; the Motif viewer will build, but is no longer being maintained and is far less functional than the gtk viewer. However, if you really want to use Motif: setenv MOZ_TOOLKIT motif

To use gtk, you will need to download and build version 1.1.5 of the gtk and glib packages from gtk.org.

3. Compiler
Gcc doesn't work to build nglayout on Irix, because nglayout uses static constructors. G++'s "collect2" program doesn't gather the appropriate symbols to send to the native loader, and GNU ld apparently hasn't been ported to Irix.

We've had a lot of problems with people using more modern C++ features like static_cast<> which the Irix compiler doesn't support (at least my 6.3 compiler doesn't, and no one has yet indicated that this had been fixed in more modern Irix compilers) and with people using NULL (defined as void*) to assign to pointers of other types (which is illegal C++, but G++ accepts it and the Microsoft compiler doesn't define NULL as void* so it doesn't see the problem).

It looks like it will be a major fight keeping people from using these features. We'd be much better off if we could just use egcs/g++ like all the other Unix platforms. The issue is that egcs doesn't pass static initializer information to the Irix loader. Someone at Cygnus is reportedly looking into this, and it's possible that a fix may appear in a future version of egcs. It would be a huge relief to switch to egcs, because that's what all the other Unix platforms are using and so all of our build problems should go away if we can successfully make the switch.

If you find a solution and get gcc working with static symbols, please contact us! Post to netscape.public.mozilla.unix, or mail akkana.

Getting the Window to Display on an SGI Visual

Once we get these build problems ironed out, the work isn't over; neither the viewer nor the xpviewer display on Irix, apparently because they can't handle the unusual SGI visual. Help is needed to track down the rendering problems and get the nglayout engine rendering properly on Irix!

Mon Dec 7 14:35:21 PST 1998

akkana@netscape.com