GnuCash on CentOS 5

[Geert Janssens]

On Tuesday 26 January 2010, Geert Janssens wrote:
> On Tuesday 26 January 2010, Geert Janssens wrote:
> > In an attempt to check if the glade-3 generated files still work on
> > Centos/RHEL5, I tried to build the current trunk on a fully updated
> > Centos 5.
> >
> > I didn't get that far though. GC trunk requires swig >= 1.3.31. Centos 5
> >  ships with swig 1.3.29.
> >
> > Swig is shipped from CentOS base, which means that support repositories
> >  such as Epel (which holds GnuCash by the way) can't ship a more recent
> >  version.
> >
> > As things stand now, it's not possible to build Gnucash trunk from svn on
> > CentOS/RHEL.
> >
> > What was the reason to bump swig to 1.3.31 ?
> 
> To answer my own question, I found this in config.in:
> 
>   # We need at least version 1.3.31 of SWIG because
>   # that's when SWIG doesn't barf on the "inline" keyword in C headers
>  anymore
> 
> If swig 1.3.31 is indeed required, then CentOS/RHEL is not a viable
>  developer platform for GnuCash in the current state of affairs.
> 
> Note that GnuCash is not part of the RHEL base distribution. It's
>  maintained in Fedora's Epel repository (a relatively conservative support
>  repository that recompiles a number of Fedora packages for RHEL/CentOS).
> 
> Epel's policy is to never override a package in the base distribution. Swig
>  is part of RHEL base, so Epel will not provide a more recent version.
> 
> I have submitted an upgrade request for swig to 1.3.31 in RedHat's
>  bugzilla. I don't know if Red Hat will consider it.
> 
Just for your information, Redhat declined my request to upgrade their swig 
package to >= 1.3.31 a couple of days ago (see 
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=490265).

So this rules out RHEL5 as a devel platform for GnuCash.

At present, it can't be built from a tarball either with the new features for 
issues raised further on in this thread (libdbi too recent, no webkit package 
on RHEL5).

I haven't tested yet to build without webkit and dbi.

Geert