[ug-bosug] Initial adventures with porting Songbird to Solaris

[Venky]

Hey Sriram,

> I spent some time this weekend figuring out the effort involved in
> porting Songbird to Solaris.
> Songbird is a major (IMO) application that depends upon XulRunner, and
> since I've got XULRunner to build on Solaris, I've decided to start to
> help port other XULRunner based apps to Solaris.

Great idea!

> - Quite few external dependencies do not have Solaris versions yet.
>   This list includes the likes of mp4 (which depends on libpthread -
> is there a Solaris version and is this API compatible with what mp4
> depends on ?),

OpenSolaris has libpthread.  It is in fact the recommended
threading library.

> libogg (I've only seen posts about problems with
> compiling libogg on Solaris 8 and on Solaris 9. And that's with the
> gcc.

Is is possible to customize the build of Songbird?  It might be
easier to just build MP3/MP4 support initially and then add OGG
later.

> - The biggest problem may well be the use of the gcc for these vendor
> dependencies. I've myself not been able to build Firefox/XULRunner on
> Solaris 10 and above using the gcc. I use Sun Studio 11 instead.
> I've seen vtable issues when mixing libraries linked with two
> different tool chains. i.e., libA (gcc built)depends on libB
> (sunstudio built).

Mixing g++ and Sun Studio libraries would not work.  I would
recommend trying to build with just the Studio 11 compilers.

> Looks like building Songbird itself on Solaris would be one of the
> last steps to address.

Great!  Let us know how it goes.

Cheers,
Venky.