[Pkg-pascal-devel] cge FTBFS on powerpc/ppc64 and arm64 [Was Re: rebuilding with fpc 3.0.0]

[Michalis Kamburelis]

Paul Gevers wrote:
> Hi Michalis,
> 
> cge FTBFS on powerpc and ppc64 (not new, see below) and arm64. On
> arm64 it looks like the cge code really needs to be ported to 64
> bits on arm. Are you interested into looking into that or should we
> consider arm64 as not supported?
> 
> See: 
> https://buildd.debian.org/status/fetch.php?pkg=castle-game-engine&arch=arm64&ver=5.2.0-2&stamp=1454452069

About
> 
arm64:

Hm, all these errors are similar, something goes wrong with math
calculations on arm64 in CastleScript. Unfortunately the original
stack trace is lost because the exception is caught and reraised as
ECasScriptAnyMathError.

Yeah, I am interested in fixing these. The easiest route would be to
get access to a porter box running arm64 for this. It has worked
mighty fine to debug the powerpc problem (see below:).

>> - if the shell parameters are correct, I would modify 
>> examples/fonts/texturefont2pascal.lpr to see what parameters does
>> it "see". You can simply write the contents of Parameters array
>> to inspect this. If the params are incorrect, you can check what
>> is returned by FPC functions ParamCount, ParamStr --- maybe they
>> are broken on powerpc/ppc64?
> 
> You now should have access for a while, still interested to try
> this out?
> 

I did get access to porter boxes running powerpc64, and did not have
time to use it... well, until today. Your mail pushed me to move the
issue:)

I pinpointed the issue to the FPC problem related to the "Dl" unit,
and I submitted it upstream on
http://bugs.freepascal.org/view.php?id=29587 .

No workaround is unfortunately possible on the CGE side, at least I
don't see one. We really need to use the "Dl" unit, it's a basis for
dynamic library loading. But I see no way to access correct
command-line arguments in a program using the "Dl" unit right now.
Well, we could probably workaround it for the texturefont2pascal
utility (that doesn't really need to use any extra libraries), but it
would be useless, as the "real" engine GUI programs (like view3dscene)
need the "Dl" unit anyhow.

So, CGE on powerpc right now depends on fixing
http://bugs.freepascal.org/view.php?id=29587 .

Regards,
Michalis