On Thu, May 10, 2012 15:20, microc...@zoho.com wrote: > On Thu, 10 May 2012 14:07:47 +0200 (CEST) "Tomas Hajny" wrote: >> On Thu, May 10, 2012 13:22, microcode wrote: > >> > Sun makes awfully nice boxes and Solaris is a very nice development >> > platform. I hope the guys will keep FPC going on Solaris. There are >> > many Solaris 10 on Sun fans. > >> >> FPC support of individual platforms depends on availability of >> volunteers >> interested and capable of supporting these platforms. FPC can target >> really many platforms nowadays, but this increasing number cannot be >> supported with constant number of developers. Someone from the Sun fans >> has to step in, otherwise the support cannot be guaranteed in the long >> term. > > Yeah, that's obvious. I'm sure anybody who was capable would help. All I > can offer at this point is development systems but that doesn't seem to be > the problem. How much platform dependent code is there? I would think if > the main product works on i386 or AMD64 for example then there isn't much > to do except build on the other targets? > > Is it a matter of not having developers for the specific platform or not > having anybody to build it for a specific platform?
There are operating system specific parts in both the compiler (i_sunos.pas and t_sunos.pas being the most visible ones but not necessarily the only ones) and the RTL. Moreover, talking about Solaris on Sun, there are also parts of the compiler and RTL specific for the SPARC platform. There are also packages which may occasionally need some platform specific adaptations too (not even mentioning the examples, etc.). All of this requires some testing at least before releases and obviously also resolution of bugs specific to the particular platform (which may involve also debugging problems reported for the particular platform to the point where it is clear that the problem lies in some shared code). Preferably, the maintainer should also run the testsuite regularly and watch for possible deviations in order to keep quality under control and avoid last minute surprises either before or even after new releases. Tomas _______________________________________________ fpc-pascal maillist - fpc-pascal@lists.freepascal.org http://lists.freepascal.org/mailman/listinfo/fpc-pascal
