On 01/01/18 09:38, Greg Troxel wrote:
A great example of this from about a year ago. There's a genomics tool, developed by a company, that would not compile with the base gcc 4.4 on CentOS. Mainly as a social experiment, I figured out the patches (remove one lambda function and one delegating copy constructor, two of the c++11 features not supported by this compiler). My patch made the code 4 lines longer, but able to build on RHEL/CentOS 6 with ease. The patches were flatly rejected despite the fact that most HPC clusters were running RHEL/CentOS 6 at the time, they regularly get support requests from RHEL/CentOS users struggling to install a newer compiler to build their software, and that this tool requires vast computational resources. So a company selling million dollar gene sequencers won't remove a few lines of bleeding edge code to support a platform that most of their customers need.David Holland <dholland-pkgtech%netbsd.org@localhost> writes:On Sat, Dec 30, 2017 at 12:22:58PM -0500, Greg Troxel wrote: > > On Fri, Dec 29, 2017 at 11:56:21AM -0500, Greg Troxel wrote: > I have reverted the addition of GCC_REQD to glibmm/buildlink3.mk on > HEAD. I left the GCC_REQD in Makefile, as it's true, and in line with > what we do now for other packages. For NetBSD <=7 I think it really > doesn't matter if glibmm builds or not on head, as nothing that uses it > will build. > > (On the branch, I think the entire set of programs related to glibmm > will still be troubled on NetBSD 7 and below, but somewhat better off > with the bl3 hack. We'll see, but I am inclined to just let that be and > hope for the best.) Have we considered just reverting the offending code in glibmm?I generally tend to not want to fight upstream, so I didn't head down that path. If you can figure out what should be changed, with a patch that isn't too scary, and makes it work with 4.8, that seems like a good path.
That's an extreme example, but generally representative of the attitudes I've encountered among developers. They're usually happy to support additional new platforms, but hate the idea of supporting outdated tools like those provided by enterprise Linux.
Just makes it that much easier to promote pkgsrc. -- Earth is a beta site.