I dug up this and the way they deal with it there is to add a cast. I'm not sure how that helps us here, though.

@rorth: Does the attached patch help? (I have no way of testing, but I did think the line was more specific than necessary and maybe the Solaris compiler doesn't like that).

Looks like Oracle Solaris Studio is a free download for RHEL. I'll give this a try later tonight when I get home. Thanks for the patch, @mdboom.

The patch alone is not enough, but the following additional changes allowed all of matplotlib 1.2.0 to compile:

===================================================================
RCS file: src/RCS/ft2font.cpp,v
retrieving revision 1.1
diff -up -r1.1 src/ft2font.cpp
--- src/ft2font.cpp 2012/10/31 00:11:14 1.1
+++ src/ft2font.cpp 2013/03/25 16:38:13
@@ -41,7 +41,7 @@
 FT_Library _ft2Library;

 FT2Image::FT2Image(Py::PythonClassInstance *self, Py::Tuple &args, Py::Dict &kwds) :
-    Py::PythonClass< FT2Image >::PythonClass(self, args, kwds),
+    Py::PythonClass< FT2Image >(self, args, kwds),
     _isDirty(true),
     _buffer(NULL),
     _width(0), _height(0)
@@ -836,7 +836,7 @@ FT2Font::get_path()
 PYCXX_NOARGS_METHOD_DECL(FT2Font, get_path)

 FT2Font::FT2Font(Py::PythonClassInstance *self, Py::Tuple &args, Py::Dict &kwds) :
-    Py::PythonClass<FT2Font>::PythonClass(self, args, kwds),
+    Py::PythonClass<FT2Font>(self, args, kwds),
     image()
 {
     args.verify_length(1);

@rorth: I think perhaps you closed the bug by accident?

Certainly: I just meant to attach my tentative patch and mark the comment as closed. The UI isn't really intuitive,
to put it mildly ;-(

Agreed -- the "Close & Comment" button is more dangerous than it is useful.

However, now I am going to close the bug because the fix has been comitted to the repository. 😉

It looks like this change missed being included in the zip posted on matplotlib.org (https://downloads.sourceforge.net/project/matplotlib/matplotlib/matplotlib-1.2.1/matplotlib-1.2.1.tar.gz). In order to build on Solaris I had to manually modify line 84 in src/ft2font.h.

[EDIT: I modified ft2font, not file_compat]

I also had to update numpy, since Solaris 11 comes with Numpy 1.4.1, which does not seem to be compatible with matplotlib. Do we require 1.5.0 at a minimum, now?

No, version 1.4 is the minimum. What happened to make you think it wasn't
compatible?

What did you modify in file_compat.h? The PR deals with a change to ft2font.cpp.

It wouldn't build because src/file_compat.h has a line

#include "numpy/npy_3kcompat.h"

I didn't need to change this file, since updating numpy fixed this build issue.

This file is not in version 1.4.1 of numpy (https://github.com/numpy/numpy/tree/v1.4.1/numpy/core/include/numpy) It is not included until version 1.5.0 (https://github.com/numpy/numpy/raw/v1.5.0/numpy/core/include/numpy/npy_3kcompat.h)

Wow. That's a problem. You're totally right. We've been 'supporting' numpy v1.4 all this time without realising we haven't support numpy v1.4 since at least mpl v1.2. I'll open a separate issue for this.

Thanks @tswast. The issue has been reported in #2152.

There is a similar bug in matplotlib 1.2.1 which makes compilation fail on solaris. It can be resolved by changing line 84 in src/ft2font.h to read:

Glyph(Py::PythonClassInstance *self, Py::Tuple &args, Py::Dict &kwds) :
    Py::PythonClass<Glyph>(self, args, kwds) { }
virtual ~Glyph();

@gunnarleffler Thanks for providing some diagnostics for us! In #2198 I implemented your patch. Can you confirm that it works?

I'm running matplotlib 1.2.1 on my test server (SUN M3000) successfully!

In addition to the fix I posted above, the setupext.py requires modification to compile using SolarisStudio. If it isn't modified, then you get "referenced symbol not found" errors when trying to run matplot lib.

The patch that @tswast provided seems to be for an earlier version of matplotlib and mangles the setupext.py that ships with 1.2.1. His patch was very informative, and I was able to edit setupext.py to work.

I can provide a diff file here that can be used to patch matplotlib 1.2.1, or on my github. Which would you prefer?

@dmcdougall

I have to jet, so here is the diff file for setupext.py that should make matplotlib 1.2.1 compile on solaris with solarisstudio 12.3:

~/m3000/matplotlib-1.2.1 > diff setupext.py.bak setupext.py
257a258,260
> elif sys.platform == 'sunos5':
>     std_libs = ['Crun', 'Cstd']
>     print "sunos5 libraries set"
345c348
<
---
>         module.libraries.extend(std_libs)
346a350
>     include_dirs.append('/usr/include')
616a621
>     module.libraries.extend(std_libs)
1045a1051
>             module.libraries.extend(std_libs)
1085a1092
>         module.libraries.extend(std_libs)
1094a1102
>     module.libraries.extend(std_libs)
1330a1339
>     delaunay.libraries.extend(std_libs)
1385a1395
>     module.libraries.extend(std_libs)

@gunnarleffler I'm having problems applying your patch. It doesn't appear to be in unified format. Would you mind applying it to your branch and making a pull request against my fix_solaris_compile branch?