IRIX problems and solutions

[John W. Eaton]

On 22-Oct-1999, Ben Sapp <address@hidden> wrote:

| munge-texi fails to compile on IRIX.  The reason is that it seems to
| have some c++ symbols that are really large when the names get mangled. 
| The GNU assembler can handle them, but the IRIX assembler can not.  The
| GNU assembler does not work on IRIX though.   So, the -fsquangle option
| is needed when you compile.  This means that to compile on IRIX a person
| need a GNU C compiler newer than egcs 1.1.   
| 
| It is probably unwise to compile the entire distribution with the
| -fsquangle option. The gcc manual explains why:
| ---gcc manual excerpt ---
| `-fsquangle' will enable a compressed form of name mangling for
| identifiers. In particular, it helps to shorten very long names by
| recognizing types and class names which occur more than once,
| replacing them with special short ID codes.  This option also
| requires any C++ libraries being used to be compiled with this
| option as well.  The compiler has this disabled (the equivalent of
| `-fno-squangle') by default.
| ---gcc manual excerpt---
| 
|  Also I hope that it does not need to be linked with other programs in
| the fututre as that will complicate things Further.   

Yup.  I found this after I made the tar file and tried compiling on a
DEC Alpha running DU 4.x, which has the same problem.  So now
munge-texi.cc uses the old libg++ Map classes (already, and for a long
time now, distributed with Octave) and should work on systems that
barf on long symbol names.

And some people have dared to wonder why Octave doesn't use the STL!  :-/

jwe