Kevan Hashemi wrote:
An exaggeration. As I said, on a modern PC (e.g., an Athlon XP 3800), it only takes a few minutes
I was not refering to "compile time". I was referring to "Where on earth do I get a non-broken version of sed?
Did you get a message that you need one (or just asking out of curiosity)? Every Linux distribution I know includes GNU sed which is non broken.
What is sed anyway?
A text manipulation tool (though you don't really have to know in order to build GPC). "man sed" or "info sed" will give you more information if you're interested.
Why won't patch work on this machine with these diff files? Is it patch that's not working or is it just that I'm a retard? What does it mean that the .tar.bz.tar archive is in an unrecognizable format?"
Where did you find a .tar.bz.tar file???
So far, that 20041218 distribution of binaries has worked on every single one of the two dozen machines we have loaded it onto. Why would the 20070904 distribution fail to work?
As others have written already, mainly two potential problems:
- Library versions. Though glibc seems to be more tolerant WRT version differences now than it was some years ago, it might still be a problem sometimes. Generally, the older the glibc version the bianry was built with, the better (backward compatibility works better than forward compatibilty), though not too old (whatever this means -- perhaps 1-2 years, and current distributions's glibc versions shouldn't differ by more than that).
- Installation paths. This can be worked around by setting environment variables if necessary. Usually, a binary would be configured with prefix /usr/local. This will not conflict with any system installation of GPC or GCC, but might with a custom installation of GPC/GCC which was also made in /usr/local, and with the same GCC version. (Though with a binary that isn't broken itself, this also shouldn't be a problem, since the GCC that's built with GPC is also a correct one.)
To be absolutely sure, you can use a different prefix, as The Chief did. (BTW, if I'd done that, I might have used /opt/gpc instead of /pascal -- /opt is for "optional application software packages", according to the LSB. I still haven't really understood the difference from /usr/local, but in this case it might jsut come in handy; and gpc is more specific than pascal.) But for a general binary download, I'd normally still go for just /usr/local.
Frank