[Gdal-dev] Supported Compiler

[Tamas Szekeres]

Mateusz,

I'm a bit uncertain what do we mean by declaring the various compilers
and platforms 'supported' or 'not supported'.

#1
In my opinion if we declare a compiler as 'supported' we should at
least make regular tests  with it. It's not enough that someone has
managed to compile the code on that compiler/platform at a given time.
What happens if a subsequent change works pretty well on some platform
but breaks the compilation on another (we can find some examples for
this kind of issue in the recent days). It's fairly unconvenient to
wait for a bug report from someone who uses that compiler/platform and
trying to find which changes caused the problem. I can eventually say
that the supported compilers should be part of the gdal buildbot
configuration.

#2
We should also have a detailed documentation for the supported
compilers, how to make the compilation and the tests (for making sure
that the compilation was successful). Though someone can declare that
the code compiles successfully on a particular platform/compiler but 2
months later he won't even know which options were enabled, which
softwares were installed or what other hacks had to be made for the
successful compilation. Therefore the compilation should be
reproduceable on a 'supported' compiler/platform.

#3
We should make further declarations about which components are
supported on which compilers/platforms because some components might
not compile on the same environment where the core gdal builds. For
example, apparently, not all of the SWIG bindings maintainers might be
aware of all of the compilers/platforms declared as supported now, he
might not have the proper environment to test them all.

#4
We should also identify the substantial compiler configurations that
will require significantly different approach when making the
builds/tests. In my opinion the difference between the Win32/Win64
builds are a good candidate to make this separation. The document
describing the Win64 with VC8 would be somewhat different as the
description of the Win32 with VC8.

So after all I can say that at first we should try to tuck the
supported component/compiler/platform combination into the buildbot
configuration and after the successful assimilation we can surely make
the declaration that this configuration is supported or not.


Best regards,

Tamas



2007/4/28, Mateusz Loskot <mateusz at loskot.net>:
> Folks,
>
> I updated the supported compilers Wiki page and now it lists compilers
> categorized as officially supported and unsupported:
>
> http://trac.osgeo.org/gdal/wiki/SupportedCompilers
>
> Cheers
> --
> Mateusz Loskot
> http://mateusz.loskot.net
> _______________________________________________
> Gdal-dev mailing list
> Gdal-dev at lists.maptools.org
> http://lists.maptools.org/mailman/listinfo/gdal-dev
>