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In Wheezy there is a source package for gcc-3.3 which only builds libstdc++5. Close examination shows that building of debian/control (from control.m4) can be modified so that the full package is built, which is my goal (legacy project, needs to be built with libstdc++5-dev:i386 and so on, but I want to build it on Wheezy64).

The question: how do I (find what to) tell dpkg-buildpackage to enable building the rest of the package? Should I just download the source package from archival Lenny?

Impossible at all?

Thanks in advance for any directions.

Jacek Krysztofik
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  • See https://superuser.com/questions/1389351/building-full-gcc-3-3-on-trusty-from-deb-src/1389352 for a related question and the answers there. – user866830 Dec 31 '18 at 18:40

2 Answers2

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yes, well.

the preferred way would be to port your legacy project to build with a current g++ (4.8). this would allow your project to run on any wheezy system (and hopefully on futgure systems like jessie/...)

if this is not an option, you should first try to download the source package from your target release (wheezy), modify debian/control to build all the packages you need, and build them. chances are high, that gcc-3.3 and friends are disabled only to guarantee that nobody uses obsolete software anymore (so debian people don't have to worry about maintaining gcc-0.1 through 6.66).

as a last ressort you could try to get the source package from lenny and build that. chances are high that this will be quite complilcated, and bug-ridden.

if youplan using your legacy project in two years from now, you might be better of stating to port it to recent ilbraries now.

umläute
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  • Thanks but, it's the management that decides on migration of a thousand machines company-wide to new system. Also, I actually tried various approaches and ended up deciding the wheezy package would be optimal **if I could enable building the compiler and linker**, so my question was not what to do - but **HOW** to enable these parts of the package. – Jacek Krysztofik Aug 05 '13 at 11:14
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I recently had to do something like this. What I did was install an old (32-bit) distro as a VM guest (which included gcc-3.4) just to make sure that it built and worked in "the past" before making changes for current build tools.

I did this mainly because you can be pretty sure that the build tools and environment worked back then, because everyone needed them. Not as many people are going to be using old tools now, so it's less clear that things will work. But it could work alright.

It's not exactly clear from your question whether you want a 64 bit or 32 bit version of this legacy software. If you want a 64 bit version, there might be fewer issues to port first to a modern 32 bit environment, then a modern 64 bit environment. At least you'll be able to identify where the bugs are.

ldav1s
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  • Not being the main issue here, it is actually crystal-clear from my question that I want to build for 32 bit target on 64 bit host system. And virtual machine is the last resort as far as I am concerned. – Jacek Krysztofik Aug 05 '13 at 11:17