[Development] Platform / compiler support

[Craig.Scott at csiro.au]

On 08/11/2011, at 1:31 AM, João Abecasis wrote:

> 
> At the bare minimum, I think we should strive to support these compilers:
> 
>    - GCC 4.2 and up
>    - MSVC 2008 and later
>    - Clang (trunk)
> 
> On the page above I also put in a list of platforms, splitting them between Desktop, Embedded and Mobile. The latter two categories only have a placeholder row, while for Desktop I put in the following platform-compiler mappings:
> 
>    - Linux: gcc 4.4 (Debian stable)
>    - Microsoft Windows 7: MSVC 2008
>    - Mac OS X Lion: gcc 4.2, clang 2.9
> 

I would strongly suggest that the LSB makes an appearance somewhere in the supported platform/compiler listing. To my knowledge, it is the only truly cross-distribution standard that exists for Linux.


> It'd be nice to have a list of reference platforms and even better if such platforms had maintainers who'd provide testing results, help fix issues and generally ensure the platforms are in a working state. Supporting a platform may also have implications on the release process. Anyway, all of that is a bigger discussion.

I have approval from my employer (CSIRO) to allocate some of my time to working with the Qt and LSB communities. We have an interest in making sure Qt can be built with LSB compilers and we may be able to contribute things like nightly build results if Qt's QA system ever supports third parties contributing such build results (we already do this for CMake, providing 32-bit and 64-bit LSB nightly builds).

--
Dr Craig Scott
Computational Software Engineering Team Leader, CSIRO (CMIS)
Melbourne, Australia