Re: Backports of newer Compilers (Clang/LLVM and GCC)
On Thu, Apr 14, 2022 at 10:35:22AM -0700, Matt Taggart wrote:
> On 4/14/22 06:35, Gerion Entrup wrote:
> > Hi,
> >
> > I'm working in academia and in our research we are experimenting a lot with compilers (and especially different versions and different compilers).
> > As a general base for our infrastructure we use Debian Stable (Bullseye) especially because backports exist so thank you very much for your work.
> >
> > Now we have seen that there are no backports in the compiler field, while there exist versioned packages in testing which are installable in parallel.
> > The concrete packages we are interested in are clang/llvm-{12..14} (while 14 is only in unstable currently) and gcc-11.
> > Do you plan to backport these packages? May I kindly ask you to backport these packages?
> > I'm not a Debian expert but hope that backporting would be relatively simple since the packages are already designed to be installed in parallel without affecting the other ones.
>
> This doesn't answer your backport question directly but...
>
> Have you considered doing your compiler work inside a chroot/container/vm
> that is running newer than stable release? That would also let you better
> control the entire build environment and ensure repeatability, debug more
> easily, etc. Most Debian development processes do this for the same reasons.
> You can also have many environments in parallel, add and delete them as
> needed. You could use one of the debootstrap tools to spin them up with the
> things you want in them quickly.
>
> I suspect once you started backporting compilers there will be additional
> things you'd want and it might snowball.
Hello Gerion,
+1 to Matt's suggestion to use chroots for this purpose. It should
give you the flexibility to to use a wider variety of compilers and
toolchains, including the ability to create your own backports.
I wanted to add that you can likely make the process easier for users
with some purpose-built scripts. And if those are general-purpose in
nature, they could become a package in Debian as well (one that we would
likely need to backport... :)
The schroot wiki [1] may be a good starting point. I also find the
porterbox instructions [2], and in particular the shell aliases, to be
helpful.
Cheers,
tony
[1] https://wiki.debian.org/Schroot
[2] https://wiki.debian.org/PorterBoxHowToUse
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