On Fri, Jan 8, 2016 at 7:41 PM, Robert McGibbon <rmcgi...@gmail.com> wrote: >> Doesn't building on CentOS 5 also mean using a quite old version of gcc? > > I have had pretty good luck using the (awesomely named) Holy Build Box, > which is a CentOS 5 docker image with a newer gcc version installed (but I > guess the same old libc). I'm not 100% sure how it works, but it's quite > nice. For example, you can use c++11 and still keep all the binary > compatibility benefits of CentOS 5.
They say they have gcc 4.8: https://github.com/phusion/holy-build-box#isolated-build-environment-based-on-docker-and-centos-5 so I bet they're using RH's devtools gcc. This means that it works via the labor of some unsung programmers at RH who went through all the library changes between gcc 4.4 and 4.8, and put together a version of 4.8 that for every important symbol knows whether it's available in the old 4.4 libraries or not; for the ones that are, it dynamically links them; for the ones that aren't, it has a special static library that it pulls them out of. Like sewer cleaning, it's the kind of very impressive, incredibly valuable infrastructure work that I'm really glad someone does. Someone else who's not me... Continuum and Enthought both have a whole list of packages beyond glibc that are safe enough to link to, including a bunch of ones that would be big pains to statically link everywhere (libX11, etc.). That's the useful piece of information that goes beyond just CentOS5 + RH devtools + static linking -- can't tell of the "Holy Build Box" has anything like that. -n -- Nathaniel J. Smith -- http://vorpus.org _______________________________________________ NumPy-Discussion mailing list NumPy-Discussion@scipy.org https://mail.scipy.org/mailman/listinfo/numpy-discussion
