On Fri, Oct 17, 2008 at 05:23:17PM +1300, Michael Cree wrote: > On 17/10/2008, at 3:56 PM, Bob Tracy wrote: > >Trying to roll my own "firefox 3" has been educational to say the > >least. > > Yeah, I also tried to compile firefox from source, and after noting > the completely non-standard build, the confusing options in the > configure script, and the lack of installation instructions, my > reaction was WTF and gave up. > > I've also tried to build GNU icecat, the FSF's modified firefox. I > think it links xulrunner statically, and after making a couple of > changes to the Makefiles (to correctly include some Alpha specific > code since it misdetected my Alpha, and to turn off -Werror on a > module so that compilation can continue) it fails on the final linking > stage with gprel errors, and that some library has objects that it > can't relocate or something (I'm working off memory here). > > Looking at the Alpha compiler options in the gcc manual I see there is > mention of "small data area" where data are accessed via 16-bit > references from the $gp register. So I tried inserting -mlarge-data > options to the compilation in the hope it might fix it, but still got > the relocation errors at linking. I understand what "16-bit relative > addressing" means, but I don't really understand (from the gcc manual) > what the options to modify compilation to use different data > referencing schemes are really doing, and what one can do to avoid > getting gprel relocation errors (my reading of the gcc manual > suggested that -mlarge-data should've worked).
Thanks for the *very* large clue as to what's going on. A quick search of bug reports led me to try adding "-Wl,--no-relax" to DSO_LDOPTS in mozilla/firefox_obj/config/autoconf.mk. The libxul.so build now succeeds! Here's the unfortunate part: the GNU ld "relax" bug was observed and reported back in 2007... I don't have the link handy, but Google found it pretty quickly when I searched for the relocation error string. If I get a working firefox-3.0.3 out of all this, debian-alpha will be the first to know about it... -- ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Bob Tracy | "I was a beta tester for dirt. They never did [EMAIL PROTECTED] | get all the bugs out." - Steve McGrew on /. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]