Mattia, et. al., My last message discussed making Wx build with g++-4.3. I turns out that I was mistaken and that Wx builds just fine with g++-4.3. The problem turned out to be more subtle.
Basically, Alien::wxWidgets' practice of encoding the version of g++
used to build WxWidgets is a problem. Specifically for the following
reason:
In Debian unstable, some architectures recently changed the default g++
from 4.2 to 4.3. The last upload of libalien-wxwidgets-perl to Debian
(on January 21) built against a wxwidgets2.6 that been build with
g++-4.2. The wxwidgets2.6 package was later uploaded again on February
10, at which time the default g++ version was still 4.2. I uploaded
libwx-perl 0.82-1 on March 28, at which time the default g++ version had
changed to 4.3 on some architectures (arm, ia64, mips, powerpc, s390,
and sparc). The package failed to build on those architectures with
this error:
> /usr/bin/perl Makefile.PL INSTALLDIRS=vendor
> No matching config:
> $VAR1 = {
> 'compiler_version' => 0,
> 'compiler_kind' => 'nc'
> };
So, it appears that the Makefile.PL for Wx relies on Alien::wxWidgets to
tell it about the g++ used to compile wxwidgets. This is a problem
because even when the upgrade is ABI compatible (as the 4.2 to 4.3
upgrade is), then it is possible for this problem to manifest itself.
After consulting with some other Debian developers, including the
maintainer of the wxidgets2.6 library in Debian, a consensus was reached
that the "proper" way to handle this is for Alien::wxWidgets to encode
not the version of g++ used to build wxwidgets, but its ABI. That would
allow for ABI-compatible changes to g++ to happen without having to
rebuild wxwidgets2.6, followed by rebuilding libalien-wxwidgets-perl
against the new wxwidgets2.6, followed by rebuilding libwx-perl against
the new libalien-wxwidgets-perl.
If Alien::wxWidgets is not fixed, that is what will have to happen. Of
course, I have discussed the matter with some release managers and
basically, that solution will not fly. Additionally, the maintainer of
the Debian wxwidgets2.6 package (Ron Lee) is not favor of gratuitous
rebuilds of the wxwidgets2.6 package as on slower architectures, it
could be in the queue for weeks and then once it does come up for build
it could take several days to get built. Additionally, if the only
solution that I can present to them is have all the packages rebuilt
specifically in that order, I am more likely to end up having
libalien-wxwidgets-perl and libwx-perl removed from Debian's official
repository. I would prefer to see them stay.
I am not an expert on g++ ABI, however I would like to do what I can to
help.
Regards,
-Roberto
--
Roberto C. Sánchez
http://people.connexer.com/~roberto
http://www.connexer.com
signature.asc
Description: Digital signature
