Erlang on alpha (was erlang on AIX)

[Per Hedeland]

Miguel Barreiro Paz <enano@REDACTED> wrote:
>
>> 	cd patches_directory ; rm .toc ; smitty install_latest
>
>	Great, certainly funny. Slashing myself in penitence.

AIX-internal joke?:-)

>	I mean, try "patch <tmp_patch_R6B0.9.txt" from the $OTP_ROOT
>directory.

Sorry, yes, there really should be an instruction on how to apply the
patches - the above is very close, really just needs a -p0 to honour the
paths in the patch files. I.e.

     cd $ERL_TOP              (i.e. the .../otp_src_R6B-0 directory)
     patch -p0 < tmp_patch_R6B0.9.txt

  or even

     cat tmp_patch_R6B0.* | patch -p0

If your patch program says something like "can't find a patch in there",
it is either very old or broken (or both), and doesn't understand the
"unified diff" format. Get a current version from your nearest GNU
archive or ftp.gnu.org.

And the instructions for the AIX patch actually explain why you should
apply all the patches:

  - To get all the problems fixed, in fact even to get this patch to
                                                ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
  apply cleanly, it is necessary to first apply all the C source patches
  ^^^^^^^^^^^^^
  above.

The diffs in the patch are done relative to a version that has had all
the earlier patches applied (otherwise it would fail for those that had
this). In particular several of the patches update the generated
"configure" scripts, and any change to the configure.in input for these
tend to generate a *lot* of diffs due to the embedded line numbers in
configure, making multiple patches to configure heavily interdependant.

But anyway, AIX specifically needs *some* of the other patches too, and
they will all be incorporated into the next release, so there is really
no reason to skip any of them, even if it would work - if there are
problems with having them applied, we want to know about that.

--Per Hedeland
per@REDACTED