[M3devel] "FreeBSD4" false advertising

[Olaf Wagner]

Quoting Mika Nystrom <mika at async.async.caltech.edu>:

> Hi Modula-3ers,
>
> I am again (for the "umpteenth" time) attempting to move a medium-sized
> under-development software repository from PM3 to CM3.  Things are looking
> better!
>
> But of course there is one snake in paradise.  Can I upgrade the software
> without installing new OSes as well (at the same time)?
>
> The installation archive marked "FreeBSD4" does *not* work on FreeBSD 4/i386
> nor on FreeBSD 5.  Is it from 6 or 7?
>
> As I have mentioned before, FreeBSD is pretty good about being
> backward-compatible (FreeBSD 4 binaries and even compilers will work fine
> on 5 or 6), but it's not at all forwards-compatible.  You simply cannot
> compile something on FreeBSD 6 and expect it to work on an earlier release
> of the OS.

Hi Mika,

you're completely right about that. The name FreeBSD4 is currently wrong;
nobody has added a new platform for every new release of FreeBSD since
the time 4.x came out. It should long have been renamed to I386_FREEBSD.
We also need to document the actual OS version an installation archive
has been built on. I'll try to do that for the next release, but for 5.8
I think we simply need to rename and/or document the build systems
(probably not before tomorrow evening though).

The FreeBSD4 archives are actually built on a FreeBSD 6 system:

FreeBSD new.elego.de 6.4-RELEASE-p5 FreeBSD 6.4-RELEASE-p5 #1: Sun Jun  
14 14:03:37 CEST 2009

I'll try to rename them on birch, at least for the release and RC5,
but I'm afraid I haven't got an actual FreeBSD 4.x system for build
purposes anymore.

The last version that may be directly useful I find on the web pages is

FreeBSD 4.x and later:  cm3-min-POSIX-FreeBSD4-d5.5.0.tgz
(built on FreeBSD 4.11 i686) at

   http://www.modula3.com/cm3/cm3-min-POSIX-FreeBSD4-d5.5.0.tgz

This could be used together with the upgrade.sh script to built the
5.8 release sources.

> I have the following on a bona fide FreeBSD 4.11-RELEASE system:
>
> (62)trs80:~>cm3 -version
> Critical Mass Modula-3 version d0.0.0
>   last updated: unknown
>   compiled: 2009-04-25 02:28:01
>   configuration: /usr/local/cm3/bin/cm3.cfg

As the version string is actually undefined, this doesn't tell us very  
much :-(

> (63)trs80:~>
>
> My bootstrapping instructions I received from Tony do not work.  Quake has
> changed so I get an error even cm3 trying to read the m3makefiles.... so
> how would I go about bootstrapping the latest CM3 on this?  I wouldn't
> trust Python on it either.  (I have Python but an old old version.)

What exactly is the error you get?
Can you try with the installation archives mentioned above?

> Yes I do want to get rid of FreeBSD-4.11 but one thing at a time would be
> my preference.  Right now I seem to have all the software happy with CM3
> (for once!)

I'd like to provide real FreeBSD4 archives, so if you get it to work,
I'd ask you to run scripts/make-dist.sh to build and ship them
(after the current FreeBSD4 archives have been renamed).

If you get stuck, I'll try to help as I can; if you can provide remote
access, I'd even try to build a working system myself.

Sorry for the inconveniences,

Olaf
-- 
Olaf Wagner -- elego Software Solutions GmbH
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