Re: [Flightgear-devel] SIMGEAR build error

[Alessandro M. <ale...@ho...>]

Following up on the C++11 issues and on my experiments:

I have investigated a variety of alternatives for building a portable
Linux TerraGear version (which can be run under BOINC). In a nutshell,
the main issue is finding an old distribution I can compile SimGear and
Terragear on, having:
- a sufficiently old version of glibc (so that the build will run on
  most Linux distributions), but
- a sufficiently recent version of GCC (>= 4.8.1, the first one which
  supports C++).

Now, there is no silver bullet, as a quick survey showed that there is
no distro meeting both criteria and that the ones using old glibc
versions have end of life dates that are not so near:
----------------------------------------------------------------------
                            GCC         glibc
Arch Linux                  6.1.1       2.23

Debian
    stable (jessie)         4.9.2       2.19
    oldstable (wheezy)      4.7.2       2.13        EOL: May 2018
Ubuntu
    12.04 LTS (Precise)     4.6.3       2.15        EOL: April 2017
    14.04 LTS (Trusty)      4.8.2       2.19
    15.10 (Wily)            5.2.1       2.21
    16.04 LTS (Xenial)      5.3.1       2.23

Linux Mint
    13 (Maya)               4.6.3       2.15        EOL: April 2017
    17 (Qiana)                      ? \  Based on Ubuntu 14.04 (so they
    17.1 (Rebecca)                  ?  } come with GCC 4.8.2 and glibc
    17.2 (Rafaela)                  ? /  2.19, I guess)
    17.3 (Rosa)             4.8.4       2.19

Fedora
    22                      5.3.1       2.21
    23                      5.3.1       2.22
    24                      6.1.1       2.23
Red Hat
    RHEL 5                  4.1.2*      2.5     EOL: March 31, 2017
    RHEL 6                  4.4.7*      2.12    EOL: November 30, 2020
    RHEL 7                  4.8.5       2.17
    * GCC 4.8.2 can be installed via the Developer Toolset.

CentOS
    CentOS 5                4.1.2       2.5     EOL: March 31, 2017
    CentOS 6                4.4.7       2.12    EOL: November 30, 2020
    CentOS 7                4.8.5       2.17

Mageia 5                    4.9.2       2.20

PCLinuxOS                   4.9.2       2.20

openSUSE
    13.2                    4.8.2       2.19
    Leap 42.1               4.8.7       2.19

Slackware
    13.0                    4.3.3       2.9     EOL: unspecified
    13.1                    4.4.4       2.11.1  EOL: unspecified
    13.37                   4.5.2       2.13    EOL: unspecified
    14.0                    4.7.1       2.15    EOL: unspecified
    14.1                    4.8.2       2.17

BOINC builder               4.1.2       2.5     EOL: unspecified
----------------------------------------------------------------------
so the (most straightforward) solution I have resorted to, for now, is:
1) attempting to build the latest GCC on the BOINC builder VM;
2) compile SimGear, TerraGear and all required libraries with it (the
   executables will probably be linked with RPATH instead of statically
   to minimize the size of upgrades).

I'll report back as soon as I have some news.

Cheers,
Alessandro Menti