Some comments from a beginner on building Mach on non-Debian systems

[Marin Ramesa]

Hello,

First of all, thanks to Thomas Schwinge for patiently replying to my 
Savannah generated e-mail and directing me to the projects page. I did 
not want to reply saying just 'thanks' as the CC: list of people was 
long and I did not want to further disturb people in their work.

I'm learning the code base of Mach and trying to setup a development
environment. I want to be able to build Mach so I can view the compiler 
warnings and do some cleanup of the code as is written in the project 
idea here: 
<http://www.gnu.org/software/hurd/community/gsoc/project_ideas/
gnumach_cleanup.html>

But there are a few minor problems I noticed:

1. There should be a note in the Hacking Guide that the specific cvs 
branch recommended there is not being maintained anymore, as the 
configure script fails when setting up the build. The git version seems
to work.

2. On a Fedora system with flex installed, I had to add /mig/lexxer.l: 
'%option noyywrap' as otherwise linker fails with an undefined 
reference. (This might be related to [4.] below.)

3. I don't see the usefulness of creating symbolic links as recommended
here:
<http://www.gnu.org/software/hurd/microkernel/mach/mig/gnu_mig/
building.html>
'$ ln -s ~/gnu/bin/mig ~/bin/' really does not do anything useful since 
the 'make gnumach.gz' searches for libexec in the '../' of the location 
of mig binary. So if a symbolic link is made it will search in ~ which 
is not where libexec is.

4. I have the same problem:
<http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-hurd/2013-02/msg00119.html>

mig -n -cc cat - /dev/null      \
  -user vm/memory_object_user.user.c -header vm/
memory_object_user.user.h                       \
  -list vm/memory_object_user.user.msgids               \
  < vm/lib_dep_tr_for_defs_a-memory_object_user.user.defs.o
"../include/mach/memory_object.defs", line 32: syntax error

Is this possibly related to [2.] above? Maybe the mig binary was 
incorrectly built. Is there another way I could see the compiler 
warnings of the Mach build? I want to be able to make adjustments to 
the code while at the same time making sure that my changes don't 
produce some side effects.

Thanks.