[Rdkit-devel] RDKit changes for RHEL/CentOS 5 packaging

[Gianluca S. <gi...@gm...>]

Since some time, I'm toying with the idea of trying to determine if
and how it is possible to build RDKit against system provided
libraries in a CentOS 5 system; this is a requirement for eventual
inclusion in an official repository.

Until version 5.6 this was not really possible mainly due to a gcc
bug, which is now fixed. Additionally, Flex is still an issue because
only version 2.5.4a is available for use (but I'm working on this).

The last issue is boost, as we have 1.33 in the repositories, so I
tried to lower the requirement to see what breaks. It turned out the
only feature used from the newer boost is the BOOST_FOREACH construct
(there were about 30 in the whole code base), so I just had to
routinely replace it with a regular for loop on the proper iterators.

So, before proceeding further (I have few tests failures to diagnose)
I'd like to hear opinions about this work: surely, I can just add a
patch on the RPM side but it would be nice to avoid the need to keep
maintaining it and eventually rebase it on new releases.

Cheers

G.

-- 
Gianluca Sforna

http://morefedora.blogspot.com
http://identi.ca/giallu - http://twitter.com/giallu