Various tweaks for getting Perl to compile on SunOS 4.x.

Doesn't work well yet, something broken in DynaLoader/XSLoader?

p4raw-id: //depot/perl@20867

3 files changed, 25 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/README.solaris b/README.solaris
index 47338b6ef9..202c8ff695 100644
--- a/README.solaris
+++ b/README.solaris
@@ -233,6 +233,16 @@ You may have to manually edit config.sh and add the -Wl,-E flags
 yourself, or else run Configure interactively and add the flags at the
 appropriate prompts.
 
+In SunOS 4.x you most probably want to use the SunOS ld, /usr/bin/ld,
+since the more recent versions of GNU ld (like 2.13) do not seem to
+work for building Perl anymore.  When linking the extensions, the
+GNU ld gets very unhappy and spews a lot of errors like this
+
+  ... relocation truncated to fit: BASE13 ...
+
+and dies.  Therefore the SunOS 4.1 hints file explicitly sets the
+ld to be /usr/bin/ld.
+
 If your gcc is configured to use GNU as and ld but you want to use the
 Solaris ones instead to build perl, then you'll need to add
 -B/usr/ccs/bin/ to the gcc command line.  One convenient way to do
diff --git a/ext/IO/poll.c b/ext/IO/poll.c
index 02a99b9725..9d39d57f2f 100644
--- a/ext/IO/poll.c
+++ b/ext/IO/poll.c
@@ -135,3 +135,12 @@ again:
 }
 
 #endif /* EMULATE_POLL_WITH_SELECT */
+
+/* gcc for SunOS 4 produces code from an empty (code/symbolwise)
+ * source code file that makes the SunOS 4.x /usr/bin/ld fail with
+ * ld: poll.o: premature EOF
+ * To avoid this, have at least something in here.  */
+#if defined(__sun) && !defined(__SVR4) && defined(__GNUC__)
+static int dummy;
+#endif
+
diff --git a/hints/sunos_4_1.sh b/hints/sunos_4_1.sh
index 650b551d81..4c9ff14568 100644
--- a/hints/sunos_4_1.sh
+++ b/hints/sunos_4_1.sh
@@ -82,3 +82,9 @@ fi
 # library.
 # 
 # Thanks to William Setzer <William_Setzer@ncsu.edu> for this info.
+
+# Don't use the GNU ld, that doesn't work, you'll get a lot of
+# relocation truncated to fit: BASE13 ...
+# from many extensions, like B and Data::Dumper.
+ld=/usr/bin/ld
+