[csw-maintainers] MySQL built with GCC → mysql config vs bindings

[Maciej (Matchek) Bliziński]

2012/6/19 Peter FELECAN <pfelecan at opencsw.org>:
> Ben Walton <bwalton at opencsw.org> writes:
>
>> Unless we make a hard standardization on one compiler, this problem
>> won't be easily solved, I don't think.
>>
>> What do others think?
>
> For the majority of projects coming from the GNU and associates, using
> gcc is the best thing that we can do. To simplify thing, all libraries
> and development tools should be built with gcc; as a side effect we
> avoid /opt/csw/gxx and other horrors. Using studio can be an option for
> end user applications, i.e. on which there are no dependencies; of
> course, for those application written in C++ it becomes mandatory to use
> gcc.
>
> These were my 2 drachmas of evening wisdom

I wouldn't like this to go unanswered. In my opinion, this is a
reasonable target state. I don't mean that there should be only one
compiler in the world. If C and C++ are portable languages, there
should be multiple compilers implementing standards and code should be
good to compile with any of them, on any system. Getting the state
where the code compiles with multiple compilers requires a lot of
work. Do we want us to be the people who do that? Many upstream
developers don't test on Solaris, which already creates a lot of work
of us, maintainers. Adding one more dimension of difference, we're
putting even more work on our plate. Not that porting isn't
interesting ‒ when building with Studio, you get to learn about some
interesting aspects of C and C++. But with time, if what you want is a
working binary and not porting fun, it just gets tedious.

I suspect that we wouldn't be able to maintain Solaris Studio ports of
all the software that we maintain. Some software we just want built
and released. At the same time, I see value in building at least some
major software projects, such as the database engines, with more than
just GCC. If they already do a good job of building with Studio, why
not continue building them with Studio? I just wouldn't like the
compiler porting issue to hamper our ability to keep up to date with
upstream releases and new builds.

Maciej