frustrated newbie

[Rupert Wood]

L Holcombe wrote:

> I am having some perplexing problems using gcc on my system.
> Currently running Interix 2.2 subsystem over WinXP.

Oh you don't want to do that. Interix 3 is *so* much nicer.

The problem with Interix 2.2 is that it's a very minimal POSIX
implementation. That's useful as an academic tool to test portability but
you end up banging your head against it when try to build most common
packages. Even GNU make doesn't work out of the box - it assumes the
main(argc,argv,envp) extension that Interix 2.2 doesn't provide.

> According to 'gcc --version' I have: cygnus-2.7.2-970404

That's very old. You're unlikely to get GCC past 2.8.x to build on Interix
2.2 without a lot of work. (More recent - 3.2+ - GCCs will build on Interix
3 with a trivial fix.) But I don't think that version's the problem:

> It seems like it is trying to compile the xdr.h file (Sun RPC), and
> i understand that it is not actually supposed to do this!

I'm not sure what you mean - that Interix 2.2 doesn't support Sun RPC (which
wouldn't surprise me except that *is* an Interix system header) or that your
source isn't supposed to include xdr.h?

In any case, a good aid to porting to Interix is '-D_ALL_SOURCE'. This
includes extra defines that they omitted by default (c.f.
WIN32_LEAN_AND_MEAN I suppose) and will many problems with portable sources.
It looks to me like your problem is a missing typedef and _ALL_SOURCE might
just catch that.

Good luck,
Rup.

P.S. I'm a fan of Interix in general, but if I don't mention this then
someone else will: another solution might be to drop Interix 2.2 in favour
of Cygwin. It gets a lot more user exposure with freely available sources
and there's more user support out there. I like Interix 3 myself though.