HP-UX 10.20 build failure w/workaround

[ Note: I'm sending this message to get it into the archives, so that others will hopefully not waste hours tracking this down. ] [ Note^2: although I work for HP, the following is *UNOFFICIAL* and *UNSUPPORTED*. This merely reflects my own personal experiences in trying to get XEmacs working under HP-UX. ] ***** Problem: Under HP-UX 10.20, with native audio enabled, the undumped XEmacs binary core dumps when run (temacs runs fine). This, of course, causes the XEmacs build to fail. If GNU malloc is enabled, a stack trace will show XEmacs to have crashed in the first call to malloc(). This bug currently exists in all versions of XEmacs. ***** Cause: Recent versions of the HP-UX 10.20 audio shared library (in /opt/audio/lib), pulls in the libdce shared library, which pulls in a thread (libcma) library. This exposes a bug in the HP-UX undump() routine (in unexhp9k800.c). The result is that the libcma library truncates the data segment at startup (before main() is entered!), which quickly causes XEmacs to crash. [ The issue is that the libcma library is somehow computing an address just past the end of BSS, and this address is wrong, probably because unexhp9k800.c has not fixed up all of the necessary headers in the undumped executable. (Unfortunately, I've stared and stared at the headers, and I can't tell what needs to be fixed.) ] I believe versions of the audio library past December 1998 will trigger this problem, and I believe that you have to install audio library patches to encounter this. I'm not sure, but I think the audio patch PHSS_17121 (or a superceeding one, like PHSS_17554, PHSS_17971, or PHSS_18777, etc.) will trigger this. To check if your audio library will cause problems for XEmacs, run "chatr /opt/audio/lib/libAlib.sl". If "libdce" appears in the displayed shared library list, XEmacs will probably encounter problems if audio is enabled. ***** Workaround: Don't enable audio. Re-run configure without audio support. ***** Fix: Unfortunately, I don't have one, and I don't know if I ever will. Perhaps someone else will come up with one. -- Darryl Okahata darrylo(a)sr.hp.com DISCLAIMER: this message is the author's personal opinion and does not constitute the support, opinion, or policy of Hewlett-Packard, or of the little green men that have been following him all day.