[RFC] Re: RFC: make IcedTea-web to be compatible with RHEL5 libraries

[Andrew John Hughes]

On Mon, Jun 27, 2011 at 02:05:36PM +0200, Jiri Vanek wrote:
> On 06/16/2011 08:10 PM, Jiri Vanek wrote:
> >On 05/18/2011 07:08 PM, Dr Andrew John Hughes wrote:
> >>On 12:48 Wed 18 May , Pavel Tisnovsky wrote:
> >>>Hi all,
> >>>
> >>>I've found that IcedTea-web can not be build on RHEL5 because this
> >>>system has older glibc libraries (2.5-*) and some code in
> >>>IcedTeaNPPlugin.cc depends on newer functions.
> >>>
> >>>I've tried to rewrite this class not to use these functions. Can anybody
> >>>please look at these changes? They are stored in an attachments as patch
> >>>file.
> >>>
> >>>Any comments are welcome!
> >>>
> >>>Cheers,
> >>>Pavel
> >>
> >>Looking at the changes, I think you mean glib not glibc.
> >>
> >>I don't think this is the right way to fix this. If RHEL5 is missing these
> >>glib functions, we should test for that in configure and use local definitions
> >>of those functions, rather than using inferior functions on all platforms.
> >
> >As there was no reply to this issue, I have an idea to add configure otion --with-rhel5-buildable, which will include pavel's patch to icedtea-web and compile it on rhel 5 so he will be able to run it on his rhel 5 test machines. What do you think?
> >

No, I've already outlined the correct solution above.  configure should check for
the availability of the missing functions (g_hash_table_iter and g_strcmp0 from what
I can see in the patch below) and use alternatives if they are unavailable (via
#ifdef in the code).  The patch below seems to require the user to know how to
invoke a specific make command to apply a patch, whereas the process should be
automated.  It's also nothing to do with rhel5 as such; it's to do with supporting
older versions of glib.

> >Regards J.
> 
-- 
Andrew :)

Free Java Software Engineer
Red Hat, Inc. (http://www.redhat.com)

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