VMS Static Builds

[s390guy]

SDL-Hercules-390 does not allow static builds on VMS. This appears to have started when OPTION_DYNAMIC_LOAD and HDL_USE_LIBTOOL were removed.

[Fish-Git]

I believe it might have been the following early 2018 commit that broke things:

Revision: 4f1b20b62218ec538b5f81f220312f61316f2656
Author: Fish (David B. Trout) [email protected]
Date: 1/27/2018 11:50:16 PM
Message: Make DYNAMIC_LOAD, BUILD_SHARED, EXTERNALGUI permanent.

Whether or not there were other commits that also contributed to the problem I don't know, but the above commit seems to be the one that removed the ability to do static builds.

As soon as I get time (I'm kind of busy with #295 and other things right now) I'll try to see if I can undo what the above commit did.

Of course there's nothing stopping anyone else from helping me out and doing it themselves instead of waiting me do it either, so if anyone wants to do that it would be greatly appreciated!

[Fish-Git]

Progress report:

I've made the changes and normal builds still work okay, but static builds (--enable-static=yes --enable-shared=no --disable-external-gui) still doesn't work yet. Many errors. Working on it!

[Fish-Git]

Progress report:

I GIVE UP!   :(

As best as I can tell, static builds of Hercules (i.e. non-dynamic-load) has not been possible ever since Jan first added dynamic loader support back in 2003!

So it is still unclear to me exactly what it is that I am supposed to do. What is my goal?

As far as I know my goal is to "fix whatever broke Peter C's ability to build Hercules on his VMS system", but unfortunately no one can tell me exactly what that was! If I knew what it was, I could probably fix it. But until I know precisely what the problem is, I cannot fix it!

Harold Grovesteen wrote:

SDL-Hercules-390 does not allow static builds on VMS. This appears to have started when OPTION_DYNAMIC_LOAD and HDL_USE_LIBTOOL were removed.

I'm sorry but "This appears to have started..." is not good enough. I need to know exactly what commit it was. The commit I mentioned in my first comment is just a guess based on the fact that that was when OPTION_DYNAMIC_LOAD was made permanent (i.e. that was when the ability to build a non OPTION_DYNAMIC_LOAD build of Hercules became impossible).

But the truth is, as best as I can tell based on my research, a non-OPTION_DYNAMIC_LOAD build of Hercules has never been possible! (well, since 2003 anyway)

As far as HDL_USE_LIBTOOL is concerned, it was never removed!

I basically reverted the changes made by the mentioned commit and was still able to build Hercules using the normal default configure/build settings (i.e. a dynamic loadable version of Hercules, with shared libraries that Hercules "hdl" logic dynamically loads and resolves, etc), but attempting to build a non- dynamically loadable version of Hercules failed. Miserably!

And that was why I originally removed the damn option in the first place! Hercules does not support building without OPTION_DYNAMIC_LOAD defined!

So once again, what the heck is my goal here? What is it that I am supposed to be accomplishing here?

It would certainly help -- A LOT!! -- if someone could identify the exact commit that broke things for Peter. If I knew what commit it was, then I would have a much better chance of accomplishing this poorly defined unknown goal.

Thanks.

[Fish-Git]

@s390guy

( Ping! )

Should I close this issue as "Won't Fix"? Or is there still some hope?

[Fish-Git]

A few minutes of Googling has revealed there are apparently some free VAX emulators out there (simh?) that I (or anyone else on the team!) could possibly use to run VMS with to try and discover that Peter C's problem is. Can anyone tell me what VMS he's using (e.g. OpenVMS?), and where it can be obtained from?

If I can duplicate his build environment -- even if it is within a virtual machine -- I might still have a hope of resolving this issue.

[wably]

Fish,

Peter is running openVMS. That I am pretty sure of. I think the release might be 7.3 but that I am not certain of.

Also, a possible source of assistance might be Moshix; he is running openVMS 7.3 on one of his machines. I know nothing about the host platform though; that is, whether he is using an emulator or not. He may be able to tell you where you could get openVMS.

Regards,
Bob