Re: Installing on AIX fails

Re. building on AIX.

For AIX I've found that it's just better to always rely on the freeware toolkit stuff, which comes on a separate toolkit CD and in any case can be downloaded from ftp://ftp.software.ibm.com:/aix/freeSoftware/aixtoolbox/RPMS/ppc These are RPMs that you install via RPM which comes pre-installed on AIX (or anyway is part of the standard AIX CDs).

On my own build the make, install, tar (gtar), grep, come from the toolkit CD (the /usr/freeware/bin/ path). At least the first two seems definitely mandatory. Oh, and AIX /bin/sh is not particularly good - it's simpler to rely on bash from the toolkit.

Depending on your AIX and compiler versions you may need some additional changes. Gary Vaughan have posted patches which include updates that will improve the AIX experience. In addition to that, if you have the old XlC 5.0 compiler you will probably be better off at this point to use gcc from the toolkit. Otherwise you'll need those patches, and also one I posted which removes some C++ comments (I should probably re-post that one because it's not against the latest git repo version anymore).

All that been said, I build on AIX as follows, using configure (which takes care of some other issues at the moment).

SHELL_PATH=/opt/freeware/bin/bash PERL_PATH=/usr/local/special/bin/perl ./configure CC=cc CFLAGS=-Dinline="" and make SHELL_PATH=/opt/freeware/bin/bash PERL_PATH=/usr/local/special/bin/perl followed by the same, with 'install'

That's with the old compiler and patches applied. Without patches you'll either have to rely on GCC (and remove those CC and CFLAGS lines, or change CC to gcc), or, with a newer (say, v10) IBM compiler), the -Dinline="" may not be needed.

The only problem now is that some stuff (git rebase --interactive IIRC) will still not work, if you're on an AIX version with Perl 5.6 (some things in git needs 5.8). AIX 6.1 has Perl 5.8, but some customers will downgrade to 5.6 because of bad performance problems with 5.8 on AIX.

-Tor