Common tasks and useful tips for porting Unix software to OS/2

This page explains some common code changes often necessary to make Unix software work properly on OS/2. These changes are mainly related to various components shared among Unix programs. These changes are tracked here since we don't normally push upstream and hence we should apply them in each new project that we port and that uses these components.

Common tasks

Fix POTFILES generation

The fix is applied to po.m4 that creates rules for POTFILES generation. Unfortunately, the upstream version doesn't take DOS drive letters into account and hence creates incorrect relative paths in the generated POTFILES file (like ../D:/Coding/myproject/trunk/...). Here is a typical fix: r1009. When applied, configure and friends need to be regenerated in the source tree and then configure needs to be re-run to generate proper Makefiles.

Fix HAVE_ICONV detection

The fix is applied to iconv.m4 that detects if the HAVE_ICONV config.h macro should be set or not. Here is a typical fix: r1023 (originally this: r934). When applied, configure and friends need to be regenerated in the source tree and then configure needs to be re-run to generate a proper config.h.

Fix EOLs in git-version-gen

Some projects use the build-aux/git-version-gen script to define the project version in configure.ac. The "stock" version of this script doesn't understand CRLF as line terminators which leads to a corrupt configure. The fix is rather simple and can be seen here: r968.

Fix OS/2 DLL name in libtool

When libtool is used to generate project DLLs, such a DLL often gets a version number in its name (e.g. libpixman-1.so.0, where pixman-1 is the base DLL name and 0 is the major version number). However, on OS/2 the version information cannot follow the extension and hence it must be put into the name part. But the name part is limited to 8 chars so libtool has to cut the base DLL name by default to make the appended major version number fit the limit. In case of the pixman this would give us pixman-0.dll which looks misleading.

A proper solution in this case is to force libtool use a special, short version of the base name for the DLL file (and only for it — all other files, such as the import library name, should carry the original name so that the linker can recognize it). This is done using the -shortname libtool option. Where to add it varies from project to project but the typical place is the _la_LDFLAGS variable in Makefile.am for the library. See r1232 for a real-life example.