On 26 January 2016 at 16:49, Robert T. McGibbon <rmcgi...@gmail.com> wrote: > On Mon, Jan 25, 2016 at 10:29 PM, Chris Barker - NOAA Federal > <chris.bar...@noaa.gov> wrote: >> >> Given that we're starting now ( not a year or two ago) and it'll take >> a while for it to really catch on, we should go CentOS 6 ( or >> equivalent ) now? >> >> CentOS5 was released in 2007! That is a pretty long time in computing. > > I understand the concern, but I think we should follow the lead of the other > projects > that have been doing portable linux binaries (holy build box, traveling > ruby, portable-pypy, > firefox, enthought, continuum) for some time, all based on CentOS 5. At some > point things > like C++17 support will be important and I agree that we'll need to update > the base spec, > but in the meantime, I don't see this as a problem where we should be the > first mover.
I was discussing this with some of the folks that are responsible for defining the RHEL (and hence CentOS) ABI, and they pointed out that the main near term advantage of targeting CentOS 6 over CentOS 5 is that it means that it would be possible to analyse binaries built that way with the libabigail tools, including abicompat: https://sourceware.org/libabigail/manual/abicompat.html If I understand the problem correctly, the CentOS 5 gcc toolchain is old enough that it simply doesn't emit the info libabigail needs in order to work. So if we went down the CentOS 6+ path, it should make it possible to take binaries built on the reference environment and use abicompat to check them against libraries from another distro, and vice-versa. Cheers, Nick. -- Nick Coghlan | ncogh...@gmail.com | Brisbane, Australia _______________________________________________ Distutils-SIG maillist - Distutils-SIG@python.org https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/distutils-sig
