OpenSSH 2.3.0p1 won't build on IRIX 5.2

[Alexandre Oliva]

On Jan 17, 2001, Pekka Savola <pekkas at netcore.fi> wrote:

> Build in everything some ancient && obscure systems just _might_ need?
> SGI doesn't even support Irix 5 anymore, AFAIK. IMO, no way :-)

I sincerely hope this is not the official position of the OpenSSH
porting team.  I understand sticking to a portable subset of
functionality is a pain, but adding a small regex package to the
distribution, or just not using regexes, as in previous releases,
mustn't be that painful.  I'm sure IRIX 5 isn't the only system that
doesn't offer POSIX regular expressions.

I'd recommend Henry Spencer's regex package, that comes with a very
liberal license and is very, very portable.  We've been using release
alpha3.6, slightly modified, in Amanda (www.amanda.org) for a couple
of years.  I see there's a newer release available at
ftp://ftp.zoo.toronto.edu/pub/regex.shar.  Please consider shipping it
along with OpenSSH, with some configury machinery to detect the lack
of regex.h and fallback to it.  Or take Amanda's approach, which is to
use it unconditionally :-)

Feel free to borrow Amanda's regex embedding technology from
common-src sub-directory.

-- 
Alexandre Oliva   Enjoy Guarana', see http://www.ic.unicamp.br/~oliva/
Red Hat GCC Developer                  aoliva@{cygnus.com, redhat.com}
CS PhD student at IC-Unicamp        oliva@{lsd.ic.unicamp.br, gnu.org}
Free Software Evangelist    *Please* write to mailing lists, not to me