From: mental@...
Date: 2006-01-26T06:27:10+09:00
Subject: Re: 1.8.4 on HP/UX

Quoting Robert Hicks <sigzero@gmail.com>:

> We are running HP/UX 11i at work (or some such). Has anyone using
> this OS run into any issues?

I installed Ruby 1.8.4 on HP-UX 11i once recently.  It's entirely
doable, but there are some gotchas.

 1. Use GNU make, not HP's make.  The latter has weird ideas
    about what constitutes "out-of-date".

 2. HP only implemented enough of getaddrinfo() to pass the
    autoconf tests; if you want a working socket.so, you'll need
    to disable ipv6 and wide-getaddrinfo so it uses Ruby's
    built-in getaddrinfo() instead.

 3. Build all the C libraries which Ruby depends on as shared
    libraries -- failing that, at least compile them with
    either -fPIC or +z (depending on whether you're using gcc
    or c89)

 4. Don't use the HP Software Porting Archive's version of
    readline; on HP-UX, the dynamic libreadline must be linked
    against -lcurses, which they neglected to do.  Easiest
    thing is probably to start with their patched source
    distribution and add -lcurses to the linker options for
    the dynamic library in the relevent Makefile.whatever.

 5. Disable the C++ bindings for any C libraries you build,
    unless you're sufficiently current with your linker patches.

I am hoping someone builds some binary packages soon, so HP-UX
Rubyists don't have to deal with all this themselves.  In general
HP-UX is an ugly platform to compile software for.

-mental