No matter what IDE I use, so far I still give up and go back to vim. However, Eclipse is quite missed for it’s autocomplete facility. The recent announcement on Hacker News gave me a glimpse of hope with YouCompleteMe, as with clang complete a while ago, but even sleeker.
But YouCompleteMe uses a number of really new dependencies, which RHEL6, being an old snapshot of Linux, is a bad target candidate since these dependencies are not easily satisfied. Perhaps stopping short of paid support, it’s unlikely that these packages will be made up-to-date. Not being a cheap-ass here, but since I really don’t like waiting, I’ll just have to roll-my-own :-)
Amazingly these dependencies are so new that even vim needs to be rebuilt due to the recently introduced python extensions, so there’s no avoiding some serious source compiling here!
Before we start, let me impart some words of advice. Firstly, even if you are gutsy enough to build your own binaries, never try to reinvent the wheel and build from pristine sources!
Secondly, installing software through package managers (eg. RPMs, .debs) are always superior to “sudo make install”. It ensures you’ll never have lingering dependencies, or wrong versions of libraries that got wrongly linked because the installed script overwrote the default.
For Redhat based OSes, since the guys at Fedora has already done the hard work of building up-to-date packages, applying patches and cleanups for you, it’ll be the best bet to avoid pain from compilation errors, or hours spent in debugging other people’s code.
Pull a copy of the vim.spec file from Fedora Rawhide and re-adapt it to your liking before building an RPM. Obviously, F19 (as this time of writing) has diverged since RHEL6 got snapshotted, so a little patch and backporting is unavoidable.
Then, there’s the issue of Clang, which is recommended to be version 3.2. Even Fedora Rawhide at the moment only supports 3.1, so I was rather surprised about such a new dependency that YouCompleteMe requires. Still it’s not a problem, just a little more hacking on llvm.spec.
Note: my Clang 3.2 build fails a single regression test during building, so I’ve disabled regression testing to allow the RPM to be built. While it may be ok for some other software, but regression test failures on your compiler is a BAD thing, especially if you’re going to build the entire OS from scratch. But since we’re only using it as an annotation tool, I’m going to let it slide.
If building those 2 things hasn’t deterred you yet, you’ll still need to deal with the last headache of building a newer version of CMake, as a dependency that YouCompleteMe require in order to compile the final ycm_core.so library. [ But why? :-( ]
Anyway, for people who want to skip the pain of building it yourself, you can get my pre-built ycm_core.so and all my vim/llvm RPM dependencies from my RPM repo (if you trust my work ;-) and save yourself some compiling hassles. They probably will work on Fedora as well, since dependencies are usually forward-compatible, but YMMV. Have fun!
Sunday, February 10, 2013
