Building latest PostgreSQL CVS Head on OpenSolaris

With the talk about PostgreSQL 9.0 alpha 5, I thought it is time for me to try out another CVS head build on OpenSolaris. Of course this time this was on my home desktop which runs OpenSolaris 2009.06
I wanted to download the CVS head. The instructions are there on the wiki page. However before following it I needed to install the CVS on my OpenSolaris instance.

#pkg install SUNWcvs

The using the instructions I created a copy of the cvs repository and created my own project workspace.

I already had the Sun Compilers on my setup. (If not or have an old copy then you can always install or upgrade it as

# pkg install sunstudio

)
So I started my task of creating the new binaries on OpenSolaris. I found it to be bit bumpy.
Here is my configure options with my standard options.

$ ./configure --prefix=$HOME/project CFLAGS="-xO3 -xarch=native -xspace -W0,-Lt -W2,-Rcond_elim -Xa  -xildoff -xc99=none -xCC" --without-readline

However then I hit my first problem to do make.
Need to do using GNU make which was not installed on my desktop.
Back to pkg manager

# pkg install SUNWgmake

Continuing again with make which proceeded and then eventually stopped again due to missing bison. (I wonder why the "configure" script did  not catch that?)

# pkg install SUNWbison

Anyway I started to run make again now that I have installed bison. Strangely it failed again.
Figured it still did not find bison. I had to use ./configure statement again and tried gmake after that which allowed gmake to pick up bison.

However it failed again.

gmake[3]: Entering directory `/export/home/postgres/project/pgsql.project/src/backend/parser'
/usr/bin/bison -d  -o gram.c gram.y
gmake[3]: *** [gram.c] Broken Pipe
gmake[3]: Leaving directory `/export/home/postgres/project/pgsql.project/src/backend/parser'
gmake[2]: *** [parser/gram.h] Error 2

This one was not easy to solve. I thought that probably the bison was buggy and was about to give up. Then I thought I will give it a shot using truss to figure out what is happening

$ truss -f /usr/bin/bison -d -o gram.c gram.y 2> /tmp/bisontruss.txt

Going through that file bisontruss.txt I found:

10451:  fcntl(6, F_DUP2FD, 0x00000001)                  = 1
10451:  close(6)                                        = 0
10451:  execve("/usr/sfw/bin/gm4", 0x08047D00, 0x08047DA0) Err#2 ENOENT

I had no clue what gm4 does, but it is missing.
I used the search feature of OpenSolaris to see if there is a package associated with it.

# pkg search gm4
INDEX      ACTION    VALUE                     PACKAGE

.....
basename   link      usr/sfw/bin/gm4           pkg:/SUNWgm4@1.4.2-0.111

As they say on TV : Yep, there's a pkg for that

# pkg install SUNWgm4

And now back to gmake

Darn another package missing:

gmake[3]: Entering directory `/export/home/postgres/project/pgsql.project/src/backend/bootstrap'
***
ERROR: `flex' is missing on your system. It is needed to create the
file `bootscanner.c'. You can either get flex from a GNU mirror site
or download an official distribution of PostgreSQL, which contains
pre-packaged flex output.
***
# pkg search -r flex
INDEX      ACTION    VALUE                     PACKAGE

....
basename   link      usr/sfw/bin/flex          pkg:/SUNWflexlex@2.5.33-0.111

# pkg install SUNWflexlex

(Of course gmake wont use it immediately till you use the configure statement again)

Finally after a long time (it sure seemed to take a long time) the gmake seemed to hang on preproc.c compilation:

"preproc.y", line 13548: warning: line number in #line directive must be less than or equal to 32767

This is just not my day.
I did a cleanup of the make. At this point I found that I forgot to enable dtrace probes in my configure statement and also since I am using 64-bit kernel, decided to build 64-bit binaries. Retrying with the slightly modified configure still did not solve the loop problem in preproc.y which just runs 100% on the CPU. I left it running for a long while just to see if it finished (till my patience runs out) It did not finish.

I finally updated my sunstudio binaries and retired  gmake. This time it succeeded in finishing the gmake. (Hence I changed my wordings above to reflect install/upgrade sunstudio).

After that a quick gmake install

$ gmake install

and the binaries are ready.
A quick check reflects

$ initdb

$ pg_ctl start -l server.log

$ psql postgres

psql (8.5devel)

Type "help" for help.

postgres=#

For a second I was expecting to see psql(9.0develop) but this is still acceptable. :-)

In Summary, you want to do the following before building the latest PostgreSQL source on OpenSolaris

# pkg install SUNWcvs sunstudio SUNWgmake SUNWbison SUNWgm4 SUNWflexlex

and the configure script

$ ./configure --prefix=$HOME/project CFLAGS="-m64 -xO3  -xarch=native -xspace -W0,-Lt -W2,-Rcond_elim -Xa  -xildoff -xc99=none -xCC" --without-readline --enable-dtrace DTRACEFLAGS="-64"

And with gmake I am ready to use the latest build of PostgreSQL on OpenSolaris.