> Since I'm replying in the pybombs thread, I did try it and it broke
> Yeah, I hear you, issue for us is we are on el6 for at least a couple
> more years as it's what our primary customer uses so all our other
> tools are built to it. Sofar I ripped deps from the windows build
> and have compiled most of them along with current GCC. Making
> decent progress(working a couple hours a week on it), when I'm
> done I should be able to post said big nasty bash script. However
> I didn't think of a chrooted modern distro, I know there was some
> docker work going on. That shouldn't take any real performance
> penalty so may be a way to go if a chrooted Ubuntu doesn't crap
I would highly recommend using Docker if you're stuck on a RHEL6/7 based system. Nick McCarthy posted about some images that are pre-built and ready for download in [1]. I've played with them a little bit on a CentOS 6 host, and it only takes a matter of minutes to get GRC running (assuming that you can tolerate an Ubuntu base image and you can install Docker from EPEL).
I've successfully used the latest PyBOMBS and gr-recipes to build the apache-thrift recipe on top of a CentOS 6 docker image (build scripts in [2]). It took some back and forth to get the autotools et. al. versions correct, but I think we're in a good place now (from a CentOS6/7 perspective, at least). I've gotten all the way to GRC on other CentOS 6 machines in the past, but it is going to take me some time to migrate everything from scattered notes and old PyBOMBS in to my new Docker environment. While you might not ever actually want to use CentOS 6 as your base Docker image, using Docker definitely helps repeat-ability when trying to test PyBOMBS.
I've also got a CentOS7-based Docker image going at [3]. It gets through "pybombs install gnuradio" without any issues (yes, including thrift), though I haven't tested it yet with the gnuradio-default prefix recipe... that will be the next thing, I suppose.
-Eric