HP-UX Porting and Archive Centre

10th February 2010
A new depothelper package is now available that helps you to easily download, install or uninstall HP-UX archive depot packages and their dependencies.

9th May 2008
You can now view the build progress of HP-UX packages and also see what new packages we are currently working on. The build progress page auto-refreshes every 5 minutes so you can see the "journey" a package takes through our build system.

15th March 2007
Thanks to the kind donation of build machines from Hewlett Packard, we now build packages on five binary platforms - the latest two that have been added are HP-UX 11i v3 (11.31) on both PA-RISC 2.0 and Itanium 2.

13th November 2006
As of today, it has been decided that the default compilers that will be used to packages will be HP's ANSI C ("cc") and C++ ("aCC"). Prior to this date, packages were built with the GNU C ("gcc") and C++ ("g++") compilers, but for various reasons, particularly performance-related ones, all new packages (or rebuilds of existing packages) will be built with HP's compilers.

10th October 2005
Thanks to the kind donation of equipment from Hewlett Packard, we are now able to create binary depots on a third platform, namely PA-RISC 2.0 on HP-UX 11i v2 (11.23). We will be rebuilding all Itanium 11.23 packages on the new platform in the forthcoming months and all new packages will be built and tested on three platforms for the first time.

11th September 2005
For the first time in many years, the package filenaming convention has slightly changed. Source packages now have -src- (was -ss- previously) in their names, whilst binary packages now have either -hppa- (for PA-RISC binaries) or -ia64- (for Itanium binaries) in their names (both were -sd- previously). This now allows users to identify the architecture of the binary packages from the filename.

5th April 2005
New site design was launched (UK only initially), plus the Archive FAQ was brought right up to date. The UK site is now also hosted on a faster PA-RISC box. The other official sites have also switched to the new design.

17th September 2004
Thanks to the generous donation of equipment from Hewlett Packard, we are now able to build packages on the PA-RISC HP-UX 11i v1 (aka HP-UX 11.11) and Itanium HP-UX 11i v2 (aka HP-UX 11.23) platforms. All new packages from this date onwards will be on those two platforms only. The existing binary depot packages for 11.00, 11.20 and 11.22 will remain on the site unless they are superseded by a new version of the package, in which case they will be purged a month after the new version has been made available. Note that binary depot packages prior to 11.00 may be mass-removed at some point in the near future.

22nd January 2004
A new A-Z Index has been made available, which not only splits listings by letter, but also by the OS releases we are actively building binary depots on. Note that the totals won't add up on the main page because we don't include 10.20 or 11.20 in the list of OS'es or any packages that don't have binary depots available.

10th October 2003
All Itanium (IPF) packages will not only be built, tested and made available for download for HP-UX 11.22, but those 11.22 packages will be further tested on an HP-UX 11.23 machine as well. Many thanks to HP for supplying the equipment and software to enable us to add 11.23 to our testing platforms.

29th April 2003
Our Itanium build system has been upgraded to HP-UX 11.22, which means that IPF binary packages from that date onwards will be made available for 11.22 (in addition to PA-RISC 11.00 binary packages). No further testing/building of IPF 11.20 packages will take place.

June 2002
The following changes have been made to the way we build packages on this site:

Hewlett Packard have kindly funded a porting effort on the Itanium Processor Family (IPF) platform, specifically HP-UX 11.22 (aka HP-UX 11i Release 1.6). This entails the eventual re-build of all the packages on this site, regardless as to whether there is a new version of a package or not.
We have made the decision to move closer to a Linux build environment when porting packages on HP-UX (because most of the software on this site was originally developed on Linux), so this means switching to an install tree of /usr/local and also the use of the GNU toolchain (gcc, g++, gmake, bison, flex etc.) wherever possible. This brings us closer to the way HP's DSPP site builds its packages and also means that we are using the same /usr/local tree that all packages using GNU's configure install by default into.
Supoort for HP-UX 10.20 builds has been dropped - note that HP themselves stopped selling or developing HP-UX 10.20 on 1st July 2002. New packages or new versions of existing packages will be built on HP-UX 11.00 and 11.22 only. Existing binary depots for 10.20 and 11.20 will remain on the site unless a new version of a package is made available, in which case the old version will be purged.
The decision to drop 10.20 was also significantly influenced by our binary build system, which can only build on 2 platforms. Since we now have funding for building on IPF, 11.22 had to be one of the platforms. This made it a straightforward choice between 11.00 (currently supported by HP) and 10.20 (now unsupported by HP) - add in the fact that 11.00 downloads far exceed 10.20 downloads from this site and the clear choice was to continue building on 11.00.
In case you're wondering why we don't support 3 (or more) binary build platforms, it's a case of economics and additional complexity. More platforms means: 1) Re-writing our build system, 2) more building/testing per package (resulting in less new packages going on the site in a given period), 3) more difficulty in making the same source work across all the platforms (we only usually have one source package) and 4) more disk space required on all the official sites (many of which would require disk upgrades).
Also note that the 2 platform build system means that we are not yet supporting HP-UX 11.11, but almost all 11.00 packages should install correctly on 11.11. This should also include the 11.00 binary depots - you may need "swinstall -x allow_incompatible=true" to install those on 11.11 (we have not tested this though).

We strongly recommend that you upgrade your HP-UX machine to at least version 11.00 of the operating system. If you cannot do this, but still wish to benefit from the source code packages on our site, then we suggest you install gcc (and preferably GNU make too) - both can be built with the bundled K&R C compiler in HP-UX 10.20.