Re: Building PostgreSQL 8.3.1 on OpenVMS 8.3 AXP

"Mihai Criveti" <cmihai(at)boreas(dot)ro> writes:
> I am trying to build PostgreSQL 8.3.1 on OpenVMS 8.3 Alpha, patched to
> UPDATE v6.0 ECO:

> $ gcc --version
> GNV Dec 10 2007 16:40:09
> HP C V7.3-009 on OpenVMS Alpha V8.3

Hmmm ... any chance of using a real gcc, instead of HP's compiler doing
a poor job of counterfeiting it? It's possible that specifying CC=cc
would help by avoiding that particular issue. However ...

> What I've seen is that GNU autotools will create an empty conftest.c file,
> and attempt compilation. While an empty file *does* compile to a.out, it
> won't return 0, but 179.

An empty file doesn't run (or even compile) on most platforms, eg

$ touch foo.c
$ gcc foo.c
/usr/ccs/bin/ld: Unsatisfied symbols:
main
collect2: ld returned 1 exit status

If the configure script really is building an empty .c file to test
with, then you've got some low-level tools problems you need to solve
before configure will do anything very useful. It looks to me like
that first test program is built with

cat >conftest.$ac_ext <<_ACEOF
/* confdefs.h. */
_ACEOF
cat confdefs.h >>conftest.$ac_ext
cat >>conftest.$ac_ext <<_ACEOF
/* end confdefs.h. */

int
main ()
{

;
return 0;
}
_ACEOF

It doesn't get much simpler than that :-( Either cat doesn't work or
you've got some shell-level incompatibilities.

regards, tom lane