Error compiling Leptonica (for Tesseract) on IBMi (AS400,iSeries) for Power PC

Question

I am trying to compile Tesseract so I can run it on IBMi 7.3 (AS400, iSeries, System/i) which has a Power PC architecture. I haven't done any C compiling with makefiles for decades so I found and am following these instruction (with thanks) and am compiling Leptonica (1.80) as a prerequisite. After some problem solving I have managed to do ./configure which seemed to work okay. Then I tried make which didn't but I read somewhere to try gmake which does quite a lot but it produces errors:

CC       webpanimiostub.lo                                                
CC       writefile.lo                                                     
CC       zlibmem.lo                                                       
CC       zlibmemstub.lo                                                   
CCLD     liblept.la                                                       
ar: 0707-126 adaptmap.o is not valid with the current object file mode.     
        Use the -X option to specify the desired object mode.               
ar: 0707-126 affine.o is not valid with the current object file mode.       
        Use the -X option to specify the desired object mode.               
ar: 0707-126 affinecompose.o is not valid with the current object file mode.

So I'm wondering if I should worry about those messages (there are well over 100 of them)?

After all those it says:

ar: 0707-126 zlibmemstub.o is not valid with the current object file mode.
        Use the -X option to specify the desired object mode.             
gmake[2]: *** [Makefile:545: liblept.la] Error 179               
gmake[2]: Leaving directory '/home/mydir/leptonica-1.80.0/src'
gmake[1]: *** [Makefile:522: all-recursive] Error 1              
gmake[1]: Leaving directory '/home/mydir/leptonica-1.80.0'    
gmake: *** [Makefile:406: all] Error 2                           

Lines 544 and 545 of src/Makefile say:

liblept.la: $(liblept_la_OBJECTS) $(liblept_la_DEPENDENCIES) $(EXTRA_liblept_la_DEPENDENCIES) 
    $(AM_V_CCLD)$(liblept_la_LINK) -rpath $(libdir) $(liblept_la_OBJECTS) $(liblept_la_LIBADD) $(LIBS)

I have trawled the net in vain to find any clues so any help much appreciated, Mark.

Answer 1

Looking at https://github.com/openssl/openssl/issues/5659#issuecomment-375022992 and Compiling pcre 8.32 on AIX 6.1 64 bit for AIX, it looks like you might need to specify OBJECT_MODE=64 and AR="ar -X64".