Re: Installing on AIX fails

Re. building on AIX.

For AIX I've found that it's just better to always rely on the
freeware toolkit stuff, which comes on a separate toolkit CD and in
any case can be downloaded from
ftp://ftp.software.ibm.com:/aix/freeSoftware/aixtoolbox/RPMS/ppc
These are RPMs that you install via RPM which comes pre-installed on
AIX (or anyway is part of the standard AIX CDs).

On my own build the make, install, tar (gtar), grep, come from the
toolkit CD (the /usr/freeware/bin/ path). At least the first two seems
definitely mandatory.
Oh, and AIX /bin/sh is not particularly good - it's simpler to rely on
bash from the toolkit.

Depending on your AIX and compiler versions you may need some
additional changes. Gary Vaughan have posted patches which include
updates that will improve the AIX experience. In addition to that, if
you have the old XlC 5.0 compiler you will probably be better off at
this point to use gcc from the toolkit. Otherwise you'll need those
patches, and also one I posted which removes some C++ comments (I
should probably re-post that one because it's not against the latest
git repo version anymore).

All that been said, I build on AIX as follows, using configure (which
takes care of some other issues at the moment).

SHELL_PATH=/opt/freeware/bin/bash
PERL_PATH=/usr/local/special/bin/perl ./configure CC=cc
CFLAGS=-Dinline=""
and
make SHELL_PATH=/opt/freeware/bin/bash PERL_PATH=/usr/local/special/bin/perl
followed by the same, with 'install'

That's with the old compiler and patches applied. Without patches
you'll either have to rely on GCC (and remove those CC and CFLAGS
lines, or change CC to gcc), or, with a newer (say, v10) IBM
compiler), the -Dinline="" may not be needed.

The only problem now is that some stuff (git rebase --interactive
IIRC) will still not work, if you're on an AIX version with Perl 5.6
(some things in git needs 5.8). AIX 6.1 has Perl 5.8, but some
customers will downgrade to 5.6 because of bad performance problems
with 5.8 on AIX.

-Tor