Gnu cmp doesn't work with Alpha object files

[Douglas Rupp]

My overall goal is development of the complete Gcc toolchain for IVMS, and to do what I have to do to keep AVMS running well. I just don't have time or motivation to keep the Gnu tools up to date or to attempt to merge in my patches to FSF (a time consuming job). Send money. :-)

Cmp is used to compare objects built during the Gcc bootstrap, and has to skip over the MHD since it contains a timestamp. It used to be the MHD was very predictably sized for Gcc bootstrap objects. That's no long the case, so this latent problem appeared.

[H.Becker]

Checksum/object is only available for Elf/I64 object files: it excludes data like time stamps. It was a piece of Schwarzwaelderkirsch (how do I get umlauts into this entry?) after having checksum/image.

It shouldn't be so difficult to write such a tool: the Alpha object language is documented. But, you need it today, right?

[Douglas Rupp]

The suggestion to modify cmp open() with ctx=stm seems to work. I'll test it in production tonight.

Checksum for alpha does seem useful in general though.

[Steven Schweda]

> [...] ctx=stm seems to work. [...]

New (2.8.7b) kits should be available at:

http://antinode.info/dec/sw/diffutils.html

Included are this "cmp" change, and a
somewhat sneaky scheme to re-jigger the
argument list for fwrite() in the generic
code, so that a difference line in redirected
output (PIPE, DEFINE SYS$OUTPUT) will
comprise one N-byte record instead of N
1-byte records. (Previously, redirected
"diff" output was approximately useless.)

[Craig A Berry]

Steven said:

> (Previously, redirected
> "diff" output was approximately useless.)

Unless you use the home-grown redirection patch I sent you on 27-MAR-2009 and reattach here. With that the file is opened in C rather than DCL, which gives the user a much better chance of getting stream-oriented behavior. You also don't have to put "pipe" in front of things in order to do redirection.

Not that there's anything wrong with your approach either.

[Douglas Rupp]

FYI I put the in ctx=stm patch when you first suggested it, and it's all working again. Thanks.