now here's a weird request, only about six years late

[Florian Limberger]

Hi,

On 23.11.15 23:37, Jules Gilbert via freebsd-x11 wrote:
> I'm running FreeBSD v7.2, with library packages from 7.4.
>
> I did put up 10.2, and that came up fine with X, except I'm a C
> developer and nothing I have seems to be compatible with the clang or
> the gcc48 C compilers.  Sigh.
>
> So for now I am stuck in v7.2 and I would very much like to run X.

What platform are you targeting with your programs?  Unless you are 
targeting really ancient systems with now long forgotten interfaces, you 
should be able to compile your C-Code with e.g. -std=c89.  This solves 
most of the problems the code examples from my copy of “The UNIX 
Programming Environment” from 1984 have, save for system interfaces like 
``sys_errlist``, which seem no longer provided in the fashion it was 
then.  For gcc, there is also the ``-traditional-cpp`` option to use old 
CPP behaviour, but from my short testing it seems incompatible with the 
modern libc headers of FreeBSD.

That said, old C had some hazardous aspects and ``-ansi`` has been there 
for a long time now, I honestly fail to understand why there still is 
software in use without it.  Probably because I’m too young…

If you decide to continue to use FreeBSD 7.2, you are essentially on 
your own, especially with respect to fast moving targets like X11, but 
as there are no security patches published, it even strikes me as 
dangerous to connect such a machine to the internet.  So even if you are 
stuck with an ancient environment, you could still try to run it in a 
virtual machine on a more recent version of FreeBSD.

Regards,


florian