GNU Development Tools For SCO (7-Jul-1995)

Overview

Beginning with the SCO OpenServer Release 5 product, SCO ships a product called the "Application Development Libraries and Linker" on all CD and tape distributions. This allows use of third party development tools to be hosted on SCO OpenServer Release 5 systems without requiring licensing of the SCO Development System.

Note: If you installed SCO OpenServer Release 5 from floppy you must order this package separately from SCO. There is a media charge.

One popular set of UNIX development tools is the GNU packages. The Free Software Foundation (FSF) has developed a well respected set of compilers, linkers, assemblers, debuggers, and other tools as part of the GNU project. These packages are available under the COPYLEFT agreement.

With the help of SCO, I have taken one popular distribution of several of the GNU packages and integrated then into the SCO OpenServer Release 5 environment. I chose the Cygnus release.

Cygnus provides commercial quality support for many GNU tools. Since they are the FSF chosen maintainers of many of the packages, they have in-house experts on these tools. Cygnus is a commercial business. While they do advance the state of free software, charging for support is their livlihood.

What is provided and why.

I chose only a subset of the Cygnus tools to redistribute in binary form. I did not provide things like GDB, the C++ class libraries, or the TCL kits. I chose the minimal amount of commands to allow an SCO user to to compile and execute most programs. I did not perform extensive testing on these tools, although I have used them to rebuild themselves. I decided (arbitrarily - a right I have as a provider of free stuff) that providing a minimal toolset would allow people to build and port these and other programs to SCO OpenServer 5. I hope others do exactly this.

I have been working with Cygnus and the FSF to get the required changes integrated into the official versions of these packages.

These tools are not a complete replacement for the SCO OpenServer Development System. If you are in the business of providing commercial products for SCO systems, you really should have the SCO package. It includes the full documentation, the SCO debuggers (dbx, dbxtra, and the Motif dbXtra) plus the SCO Optimizing C Compiler that generates thoroughly impressive code.

Using these packages

  • You must have SCO OpenServer Release 5. These absolutely, positively, will not do anything productive on any earlier release. To help drive this point home, I have provided only ELF binaries. They will flatly fail to execute on earlier releases.

  • Invoke custom

    Select "Install New" option from the "Software" menu.

    Follow the prompts to steer custom toward the original media you used to install SCO OpenServer 5.

    Select Application Development Libraries and Linker. Install it all. This will give you the libraries, headers, and man pages.

  • The source distribution is provided as a tar archive named gds.tar.gz. You must extract these in a writeable directory with enough space. The files total about 42 MB when uncompressed.

  • cd gunzip /skunkware/src/Tools/gds/gds.tar.gz | tar xf -

    Using the tools

    The GNU documentation is provided, and will apply almost wholescale to this project. The following exceptions are noted. All apply to the compiler, gcc.

    -B elf instructs the compiler to emit ELF. The default is to emit COFF.

    -Ansi uses ANSI headers and libraries

    -Compat30 used ODT 3.0 compatible headers and libraries.

    -Posix uses POSIX headers and libraries.

    -Xpg4 uses XPG4 headers and libraries.

    -Xpg4plus uses XPG4 headers and libraries, with chosen extensions fro the ODT 3.0 environment. This is the default.

    Rebuilding from source

    In any package of this flexibility, there are a number of ways it can be configured. Some will surely look at my method and find it obtuse. The major rationale of it is that it parallels the method I use at my day job and that of Cygnus. Since I will typically build about eight sets of compilers from the same source tree [ two are used in this project ] having them each in separate directories really is a necessity.

    The master source is in /skunkware/src/Tools/gds/gds.tar.gz.

    I create two directories. One is elf, one is coff. There is some overlap between the two sets to allow independent builds. The ELF release is the more capable of the two. For example, the 'nm' command in the ELF tree knows about COFF, but the 'nm' in the COFF tree does not know about ELF.

    To make both COFF and ELF releases:

    make all

    To make the COFF release:

    make coff

    To make the ELF release:

    make elf

    It is important that the make install of the ELF tree be done after that of the COFF release. While some things are redundant (i.e., 'make' doesn't know anything about the object file format) the only tools that know about both are those in the ELF tree.

    The binaries are provided with no debugging, but are not stripped. This is likely to be a problem only if you are debugging the tools themselves. If this is the case, you know how to make your own set with debugging and unstripped.

    Also, to simplify the naming somewhat (and allow reasonable use of the '-b elf' flag), I suggest making /usr/local/lib/gcc-lib/elf a symlink to /usr/local/lib/gcc-lib/i486-unknown-sco3.2v5.0.0elf.

    Bribing the Contributor:

  • Patches and enhancements are welcome.

  • Complaints about the GNU versions I used are not.

  • Suggestions are accepted.

  • Whining is not.

    If you find this work useful, find a nice postcard of your hometown and send it to: 

    		Robert Lipe
		102 Pebble Creek Road
		Franklin, TN  37064  USA
    Hopefully, this will help me judge if anyone appreciates this work enough to continue to maintain it.

    If you find it *really* useful, I wouldn't decline a care package from a local microbrewery along with a short description of the wares produced there. :-)

    Known limitations

    C++ is provided, but untested.

    Compatibility with SCO supplied debuggers is untested. GDB could probably be trained to play nice with these programs if it doesn't already. Passing the -gstabs flag to gcc would probably increase the chances of it working.

    Without Whom Department

    Of course, any project like this is the results of the work of many. However, some in particular stand out.
  • Larry Philps larryp@sco.com twisted my arm into doing this with one sentence. (grumble, grumble. Tell me I'm not guru enough....) Larry also provided much testing, some documentation, and many quick answers about the SCO provided tools that we have to interface with.

  • John R. MacMillan john@sco.com was very patient with my questions ranging from the undocumented to the blatantly documented. He unraveled the mysteries of the .notes section and many geeky details on the linker internals.

  • Many SCO employees that actively monitor Usenet including Bela Lubkin and Dion Johnson for listening to the feedback about the need of freely available libraries, headers, etc. and helping to make it happen by passing that feedback on.

  • Of course, the GNU project must be thanked for providing us with such a solid code base to work from. Support them any way you can!

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