Compiling on AIX

prerequisites

• xlc and gcc both are reported to work
• It's strongly suggested to install the coreutils RPM and be sure /opt/freeware/bin/install is high in your PATH and found by APR configure for BSD-compatible install.
  • covener believes this might solve failures to install DSO's.
• Building a recent autoconf, m4, libtool, and zlib (and maybe PCRE?) to some shared prefix doesn't hurt (e.g. $HOME/gnu)
• For something long forgotten, adding that prefix to your LIBPATH helps some stage of the build
  • export PATH=$HOME/gnu/bin:/opt/freeware/bin:$PATH

  • export LIBPATH=$LIBPATH:$HOME/gnu/

• Setting CONFIG_SHELL=/usr/bin/bash can speed up ./configure significantly.
• Old tarballs with an old config.guess/config.sub require AIX 6.1 and later to impersonate AIX 5.3
  • export ac_cv_build="powerpc-ibm-aix5.3.0.0"
  • export ac_cv_build_alias="powerpc-ibm-aix5.3.0.0"

64-bit

• Set both OBJECT_MODE=64 and CC="xlc_r -q64"

Link errors with bundled expat and when using DESTDIR

• If you use a bundled expat, you might find the link of apr-util fails. The following change might help:

  • perl -p -i.orig -e \"s#[^ ]+libexpat.la#-L$curdir/srclib/apr-util/xml/expat/lib/ -lexpat#; s#[^ ]+libapr-1.la##;\" $PWD/srclib/apr-util/Makefile

AIX layout discussion

• /usr/local is not a normal area on AIX, instead...
• /opt/httpd for binaries and static files (to be a USR part of an installp package)
• /etc/httpd as base for config files, /var/httpd as base for data files, both areas as ROOT component of an installp package
• /usr/share/man for the man pages so that man httpd-foo works directly
• further build dependencies (lib and include files) install and-or sym link to /opt/lib and /opt/include OR set-use symlinks to /usr/lib and /usr/include from whereever they are actually installed (/opt is proposed as suggested install location
• intention is that using /opt, /var, /etc as directories will directly support system WPARs