Re: Porting GNU Projects - Guile

[Mike Gran <spk121@yahoo.com>]

> From: bornlibra23 <awarikoo@nse.co.in>
> 
> Hello People
> I am trying to port various GNU products to Stratus OpenVOS platform
> including the guile project. However I am stuck currently for the lack of
> wide & multibyte character support. Can somebody guide me to an
> implementation of the same that I can port first. The glibc is also proving
> a monster to port for various reasons. I have tried to build the wide
> character support of glibc separately but it didnt workout. Can somebody
> isolate the code & guide me in implementing it on VOS? This is proving to be
> a major blocker. Please help
> Thanks
> bornlibra23

Hi-

I'm a little unclear on what you need first.  It is

1. Guile doesn't do multibyte characters.

or

2. You are having problems building GNU programs in general because it is
hard to get glibc's multibyte characters to work.

If it is the former (#1) case, it is true that Guile doesn't do multi-byte.
There is an experimental version of Guile in the Git repository that does do 
multi-byte characters, but, it is still brand new and not well tested.
But, FWIW, it is the git string_abstraction2 tree.  Hopefully the multi-byte
chars support will make its way into mainline Guile in time for 2.0.

If it is the latter case, I imagine that porting GNU libc is tricky.  I
tried it once, years ago, and it was painful.

For Guile compilation problems in general for a new platform, it might help 
to use the "--disable-error-on-warning" options for Guile's ./configure 
at first when trying to get it to compile.

Also, I saw that you were trying to compile 1.8.6.  There is a 1.8.7, which
has some bug fixes.

-Mike