GnuCash on CentOS 5

[Geert Janssens]

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. 

Geert