Solaris 7 assembler patch breaks egcs

[John Harper <harper at scar dot utoronto dot ca>]

After fighting with gcc 2.8.1 for a while trying to compile X11R6.4 on
Solaris7, someone suggested I use egcs instead - I have, and a similar
problem occurs. 

As far as I can tell, if the Solaris7 assembler patch 107058 is
installed, then the compiler built using that version of as is badly
broken. The C compiler isn't too bad, it will compile many things ok,
but not X11R6.4. The C++ compiler is bust - it can't even compile a
hello world program, and the testsuite had 653 unexpected errors.

If I revert to the original Solaris7 assembler, everything seems to
work ok when I recompile the compiler. If the patched assembler is
used with a working compiler, the programs seem to work, but you'll
get burned if you try to install a new compiler version.

I'm guessing this has to do with some 64 bit mess-up, and I gather
egcs isn't quite ready to do 64bit compiles on Solaris, so you might
want to be careful with this patch. It unfortunately also makes me
afraid of any other patches to loaders/libraries etc that might break
things unexpectedly.

John Harper
------------------------------------
Academic Computing Coordinator
University of Toronto at Scarborough
harper@scar.utoronto.ca