Support for RHEL?

Discuss issues related to installing or building
b22
Posts: 5
Joined: Mon Oct 23 2017 2:54 am

Support for RHEL?

Post by b22 »

I didn't see RHEL 7 or CentOS 7 on the list of supported operating systems. Before I spend time investigating or trying to build CopperSpice there, is there anything I should know about? Any reason to think it won't work?

At least in my particular field, RHEL is the standard, so I'd love to see it officially supported if possible.
marlowa
Posts: 117
Joined: Sun Oct 25 2015 10:52 am

Re: Support for RHEL?

Post by marlowa »

b22 wrote:I didn't see RHEL 7 or CentOS 7 on the list of supported operating systems. Before I spend time investigating or trying to build CopperSpice there, is there anything I should know about? Any reason to think it won't work?

At least in my particular field, RHEL is the standard, so I'd love to see it officially supported if possible.
So would I. The project I am on places an emphasis on versions of linux that are typically deployed in corporations that pay for support agreements, so RHEL is typical.
ansel
Posts: 152
Joined: Fri Apr 10 2015 8:23 am

Re: Support for RHEL?

Post by ansel »

In the last few months we have added a new version of Debian, Mac OS X, and we are about to update to add support for Ubuntu 18.04. We do want to support as many Linux distributions as we can.

Unfortunately it appears the compiler shipped with RHEL/CentOS 7 is GCC 4.8.5, which is far too old to have the level of C++14 support that CopperSpice requires. You could of course build or install a newer version of GCC. If there is a commonly used third-party backport repository with GCC 5.4.0 or newer available, we would be interested in adding it to our list of supported platforms.
Ansel Sermersheim
CopperSpice Cofounder
jbober
Posts: 1
Joined: Thu Apr 11 2019 7:41 am

Re: Support for RHEL?

Post by jbober »

@ansel
Hello I tried to compile for rhel/centos, but failed due to lack of dependencies/time
but, I stumbled on this thread and just let me give a hint how to compile for rhel/centos if you please.
There is an official way to install new gcc on rhel/centos, that will not disrupt original gcc that comes with the distribution.

sudo yum install centos-release-scl-rh
sudo yum install devtoolset-8-gcc-c++
and then run:
scl enable devtoolset-8 bash
This will run new bash session with a brand new gcc with the support of c++17

you can make it permanent system-wide, just create
etc/profile.d/enable_devtoolset.sh

#!/bin/bash
source scl_source enable devtoolset-8

and reboot

The way it works is that linking process will take all the symbols provided by original libstdc++ provided by the distro, and then link in statically missing parts that comes with new compiler.
This way you can ship provided binaries without installing/providing new libstdc++
You can even build it on rhel6 and run on rhel7, but not otherwise:
https://access.redhat.com/documentation ... patibility

We do this in our IT shop and never found problems with this solution.
Regards,
-Jarek
ansel
Posts: 152
Joined: Fri Apr 10 2015 8:23 am

Re: Support for RHEL?

Post by ansel »

Hello I tried to compile for rhel/centos, but failed due to lack of dependencies/time
but, I stumbled on this thread and just let me give a hint how to compile for rhel/centos if you please.
There is an official way to install new gcc on rhel/centos, that will not disrupt original gcc that comes with the distribution.
Thanks so much for your message.,this is really helpful information. I will start working on setting up CentOS on our CI and see what we can do to put it in our list of supported platforms. If you have a moment to let us know which dependencies you had issues with, that would be useful.
Ansel Sermersheim
CopperSpice Cofounder
b22
Posts: 5
Joined: Mon Oct 23 2017 2:54 am

Re: Support for RHEL?

Post by b22 »

As @jbober pointed out, there is an official way to get new compilers on CentOS and RHEL. It's called Software Collections. It's updated every May and November. Software Collections contain several programs including newer versions of MySQL, etc. The compilers are included in devtoolset.

https://wiki.centos.org/AdditionalResou ... tories/SCL
b22
Posts: 5
Joined: Mon Oct 23 2017 2:54 am

Re: Support for RHEL?

Post by b22 »

IIRC, devtoolset-8 was released in November 2018. However, I can only find devtoolset-7 on this site:

https://www.softwarecollections.org/en/ ... toolset-7/

It's possible that devtoolset-8 is part of the RHEL Software Collections, but has not yet been recompiled for the CentOS Software Collections.

I expect an update to be released this month.
ansel
Posts: 152
Joined: Fri Apr 10 2015 8:23 am

Re: Support for RHEL?

Post by ansel »

b22 wrote:As @jbober pointed out, there is an official way to get new compilers on CentOS and RHEL. It's called Software Collections. It's updated every May and November. Software Collections contain several programs including newer versions of MySQL, etc. The compilers are included in devtoolset.

...

I expect an update to be released this month.
Thanks again for this information. We are in the process of adding CentOS to our CI system and hopefully will be releasing CentOS packages with the next version of CopperSpice. If you want to help out in any way with this process, let us know.
Ansel Sermersheim
CopperSpice Cofounder
marlowa
Posts: 117
Joined: Sun Oct 25 2015 10:52 am

Re: Support for RHEL?

Post by marlowa »

b22 wrote:IIRC, devtoolset-8 was released in November 2018. However, I can only find devtoolset-7 on this site:

https://www.softwarecollections.org/en/ ... toolset-7/
This is also what I find. I have been using gcc-7 on RHEL7 for some time now. It has much better support for C++11 but support for more recent dialects still seems incomplete. RHEL8 is now finally out of beta and comes with gcc-8 but even there we find that C++17 features are marked as experimental. It's not until we get to gcc-9.1 that they are no longer experimental. I hope that copperspice and doxypress will be made available in RHEL8 at least, even though the C++17 support is not official at that point.
marlowa
Posts: 117
Joined: Sun Oct 25 2015 10:52 am

Re: Support for RHEL?

Post by marlowa »

ansel wrote: Sun Mar 25 2018 4:55 pm Unfortunately it appears the compiler shipped with RHEL/CentOS 7 is GCC 4.8.5, which is far too old to have the level of C++14 support that CopperSpice requires.
For a while now RHEL7 has had the option of installing gcc-7. And recently, support for installing gcc-8 has been added.
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