[cfarm-users] Installing emacs on GCC119/AIX

[Jonathan Wakely]

On 11 October 2017 at 15:23, Martin Jambor via cfarm-users
<cfarm-users at lists.tetaneutral.net> wrote:
> Hello,
>
> On Wed, Oct 11, 2017 at 09:01:38AM -0500, CM Graff via cfarm-users wrote:
>> I believe the problem is that very few of us actually want or need
>> AIX.
>
> Why would that be the problem?  Or even a problem?
>
>> It's nice of IBM to donate machines, but we need them running
>> linux, netbsd or freebsd.
>
> No...?

Well they already donated two (huge) servers running GNU/Linux, so
complaints about *also* donating AIX ones are particularly stupid. IBM
are donating machines in the hope that "we" will use them to make sure
Free Software works on their systems, so of course they want those
machines to actually run their systems.


>> I don't advertise my work here, and nor
>> would I expect it to be pre-installed if I donated a machine. Why
>> should IBM be any different.
>
> I do not understand the above at all so cannot comment.
>
>> Furthermore, the product AIX is just not,
>> and never has been important to the free software community, leading
>> to time wastage and novelty test runs.
>
> I have no clue how important AIX is to anybody, from time to time I
> just want to test my more invasive patches in an environment that is
> different from what I use normally and for that AIX is (potentially)
> very useful, so I am very happy we have it in the farm.
>
> I put potentially in a bracket above because I do it fairly rarely and
> always forget what exactly needs to be done to bootstrap gcc on AIX
> and so when it fails (like it does for me now), I never know whether
> trunk is broken or I messed something up.  I think that a mini-HOWTO
> on the compile farm wiki page would go a long way to make the machine
> more useful.

Funny you should say that, I was just about to add one.