PDO Installation Q&A

Creation Date: August 1, 1998
Keywords: Solaris, HP-UX, PDO

Q:  What does PDO do to the header files on my system and will this affect my other developing environments?

A:  The header files on some systems are incompatible with the ANSI C standard.  The PDO install script runs the "fixincludes" script, provided by GNU with gcc, which fixes up some of these "broken" headers so they work correctly with ANSI C.  The changes are syntactical in nature only; it doesn't add or remove any definitions.  It also ensures that the standard ANSI header files are present (such as stdarg.h).

The "fixincludes" script does not modify directly any of the system header files.  It makes a copy of each header it needs to fix (in /usr/NextDeveloper/lib/gcc-lib/`arch`/2.5.8/include) and modifies the copy.  Gcc searches this directory before it searches the system directories, so it picks up the altered headers first.  Since "fixincludes" makes a copy of the headers to a directory only gcc searches, this has no impact on any other compilers which might be installed.