brass and chert / xapian port to Interix

[Eric Lindblad]

Report by Eric Lindblad 30-09-2015
http://www.ericlindblad.blogspot.com

The xapian-core-1.2.21 'ambiguous overload' error on the files /backends/brass/brass_check.cc and /backends/chert/chert_check.cc appear to be resultant of a bug reported in gcc-3.3.4, which was fixed for 3.4.2 [Sept. 6, 2004] and 3.5.

Bug 16854 - streams missing "long long" specializations on Tru64
https://gcc.gnu.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?format=multiple&id=16854

Running 'g++ foo.cc' (from the above link) utilising the gcc-3.3 shipped with SFU Interix 3.5 was informative.

$ cat > foo.cc
#include <iostream>
using namespace std;
int main() {
  long long i;
  cout << i << endl;
}

the error output being identical to that appearing in Bug 16854.

SFU shipped with gcc-3.3 but the bug was reported for gcc-3.3.4.

Note gcc-4.2.1 was essentially a bug fix release, the bug not the same as the one cited in gcc-3.3.4.

http://permalink.gmane.org/gmane.comp.search.xapian.general/9883
http://permalink.gmane.org/gmane.comp.search.xapian.general/9880
http://permalink.gmane.org/gmane.comp.search.xapian.general/9862

Initially I located a message series on an SFU Interix 3.5 'ambiguous overload' error here:
[LLVMdev] AsmWriter.cpp:255: error: ambiguous overload for `std::basic_ostream<char,...
http://lists.llvm.org/pipermail/llvm-dev/2004-July/001421.html

If someone has a Vista Ultimate or Windows 7 Ultimate box with network access and would be inclined to install respectively SUA 6.0 or 6.1, make-3.81, m4-1.4.9, libuuid-1.0.3 (patched), and a static zlib, and compile xapian-core-1.2.21 modifying my script to use SUA's gcc-4.2, and deleting the lines --disable-backend-brass and --disable-backend-chert, it would clear up whether the 'ambiguous overload' error would be resolved on these two backends utilising SUA's 6.0 or 6.1 gcc-4.2.

If the error still occurs then the compile might be rerun with those backends again disabled and the results of 'gmake check' when run on a machine with network access could be posted.

All of my work on the Interix port has been done on a hacked and modified SFU Interix 3.5 installation on XP Home.

- - -

Interix and mmap() semantics are mentioned here:
http://lbw.sourceforge.net/broken.html