[odb-users] gcc plugin support on RHEL/CentOS 5 and 6?

[Boris Kolpackov]

Hi Dave,

Dave Johansen <davejohansen at gmail.com> writes:

> However, I would like to get the standard packaging/rpm stuff setup and
> maybe even contributed to the EPEL so it could be used easily by more than
> just myself.

That would definitely be great. If you were to do this you will have
"priority assistance" from me ;-).


> I believe that's a lot easier of a process if it can be built
> from source. 

Yes, the cleanest way to do it would be to use GCC that ships with RHEL
to build the ODB compiler from source.


> But I'm assuming that the requirement for GCC 4.5 is because of a
> feature that was introduced in that release (and I'm guessing it is
> some enhanced C++0x support). Is that the case?

Actually, it is the plugin support. The ODB compiler underneath is
implemented as a GCC plugin and uses the its frontend for C++ parsing.
And plugin support first appeared in GCC 4.5.0.


> And if so, how extensive is the use of GCC 4.5 features? Basically,
> how hard would it be to get the odb compiler to build on GCC 4.4?

I believe it would be pretty hard. Essentially we would need to
backport plugin support to GCC 4.4 and then convince RH to build
an update with this support.

I think, realistically, we can produce clean ODB packages for
RHEL 7 (and for Fedora). Maybe starting with Fedora is a good
idea.

For earlier versions the best bet is to package a private version
of GCC.

Boris