Re: etch --> lenny upgrade report on Alpha platform

[Bob Tracy <rct@gherkin.frus.com>]

On Fri, Oct 17, 2008 at 05:23:17PM +1300, Michael Cree wrote:
> On 17/10/2008, at 3:56 PM, Bob Tracy wrote:
> >Trying to roll my own "firefox 3" has been educational to say the  
> >least.
> 
> Yeah, I also tried to compile firefox from source, and after noting  
> the completely non-standard build, the confusing options in the  
> configure script, and the lack of installation instructions, my  
> reaction was WTF and gave up.
> 
> I've also tried to build GNU icecat, the FSF's modified firefox.  I  
> think it links xulrunner statically, and after making a couple of  
> changes to the Makefiles (to correctly include some Alpha specific  
> code since it misdetected my Alpha, and to turn off -Werror on a  
> module so that compilation can continue) it fails on the final linking  
> stage with gprel errors, and that some library has objects that it  
> can't relocate or something (I'm working off memory here).
> 
> Looking at the Alpha compiler options in the gcc manual I see there is  
> mention of "small data area" where data are accessed via 16-bit  
> references from the $gp register.  So I tried inserting -mlarge-data  
> options to the compilation in the hope it might fix it, but still got  
> the relocation errors at linking.  I understand what "16-bit relative  
> addressing" means, but I don't really understand (from the gcc manual)  
> what the options to modify compilation to use different data  
> referencing schemes are really doing, and what one can do to avoid  
> getting gprel relocation errors (my reading of the gcc manual  
> suggested that -mlarge-data should've worked).

Thanks for the *very* large clue as to what's going on.  A quick search
of bug reports led me to try adding "-Wl,--no-relax" to DSO_LDOPTS in
mozilla/firefox_obj/config/autoconf.mk.  The libxul.so build now
succeeds!  Here's the unfortunate part: the GNU ld "relax" bug was
observed and reported back in 2007...  I don't have the link handy,
but Google found it pretty quickly when I searched for the relocation
error string.

If I get a working firefox-3.0.3 out of all this, debian-alpha will be
the first to know about it...

-- 
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Bob Tracy          |  "I was a beta tester for dirt.  They never did
rct@frus.com       |   get all the bugs out." - Steve McGrew on /.
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