IRAF on Solaris 7

Doug Tody wrote on Feb 11, 1999

We installed Solaris 7 on a server here at NOAO earlier this week, and were
able to run a few brief tests with IRAF V2.11.  The distributed Sun/IRAF V2.11
executables were linked on Solaris 2.5.1, but have been tested with and
support versions of Solaris through 2.6.

Basic execution appears to be ok although I did little more than verify
that the system starts up and simple tasks run.  Any use of networking
however causes the task to fail with a segmentation violation.  Building
and installing an IRAF shared image (S11_5.7.e) for Solaris 7 did not fix
this problem.  Relinking the executable being tested (e.g. x_system.e) does
fix the problem.  It was interesting to note that the new executables linked
under Solaris 7 are 30% larger, but appear to run on earlier versions of
Solaris (this was not the case with Solaris 2.6).

A minor problem in unix/boot/spp/rpp/ratlibc prevents linking rpp.e (an
internal HSI executable) during a sysgen-reboot.  This has been fixed in
the development system.  Other than that things appear to build fine on
the new OS.  The compilers we are using are the older ones used under
Solaris 2.6; I don't think these were affected by the new release of
Solaris.

This is as far as we tested for now, as all we wanted to do was get a 
quick idea of the situation with Solaris 7, and determine a simple patch
(such as a new shared image) was possible.  A full patch and testing is
needed so we won't do more until it comes time to generate this.

What does this mean for a IRAF site thinking of upgrading to Solaris 7?
If you have a choice it is better to wait until we release a patch to
fully support Solaris 7.  If you don't have a choice, e.g. you need to
put IRAF on a system that is already runnning Solaris 7, then most things
should work but you will have to avoid networking.

We should have a patch (V2.11.2 or greater) out to support Solaris 7
sometime around late spring.  The current plan is to wait until other
development work is completed (e.g. Y2K and GUI support) and not release
the patch then, to minimize the number of patch releases and hence the
effort for everyone involved.  This plan could change however if it turns
out a patch is needed sooner.

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Last post on Feb 11, 1999