RTEMS Source Builder newlib/iconv issues on OpenBSD/Solaris

[Karel Gardas]

Hello,

on both Solaris 11 and OpenBSD 5.7 I do have an issue with source 
builder which fails on newlib compilation. This shows as:

checking for sparc-rtems4.11-ar... sparc-rtems4.11-ar
checking for sparc-rtems4.11-ranlib... sparc-rtems4.11-ranlib
checking for sparc-rtems4.11-readelf... sparc-rtems4.11-readelf
checking whether to enable maintainer-specific portions of Makefiles... no
checking for a sed that does not truncate output... 
/tmp/rtems-sparc-toolchain/bin//sed
checking how to print strings... print -r
checking for gawk... (cached) gawk
configure: error: big5 is not supported - see 
../../../gcc-4.9.2/newlib/libc/iconv/encoding.aliases file for the list 
of available encodings
gmake[1]: *** [configure-target-newlib] Error 1
gmake[1]: Leaving directory 
`/export/home/karel/vcs/rtems-source-builder/rtems/build/sparc-rtems4.11-gcc-4.9.2-newlib-2.2.0.20150423-i386-pc-solaris2-1/build'
gmake: *** [all] Error 2


the problem is in newlib's configure file which strictly requires GNU 
sed/grep combo. The problem is the configure file itself invokes just 
"sed" and "grep". So there are two solutions to this issue:

Either:

- disable iconv as I did for OpenBSD in provided patch in source builder 
platform file

or

- put GNU sed and grep (perhaps grep is enough, but I would need to 
retest) into PATH in front of original system's grep/sed. This makes 
newlib configure happy.

The general question is what's better and how to solve this issue? Just 
a note in builder doc for both platforms? Or custom patch to newlib to 
check for ggrep/gsed and when available to use them? Or just disabling 
iconv completely in platform .py file of the source builder itself? Or 
hacking source builder to support building GNU sed/grep on problematic 
platform, installing in RTEMS bin and use that and this way make newlib 
happy?

Any idea/preference welcome here.

Thanks!
Karel