Please update swig version to not depend on deprecated PCRE

[elmarco]

Description

We are trying to get renderdoc back in Fedora.

Unfortunately, the dependency on swig & pcre is problematic, as PCRE is deprecated, see also:
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=2254392#c2

I would help if you could update the swig version to latest that can use pcre2, or make building possible --without-pcre

Environment

RenderDoc version: 1.30, git
Operating System: Fedora

[baldurk]

Building without pcre is not possible as it's required for the bindings generation. This is a duplicate of #2945 and I'm still not convinced that this is an important enough thing to make changes to fix.

I'll think about if there's a reasonable compromise here, ideally one that only impacts people on these distros who can't get the normal library, but please note that I'm not responsible for any distro packages and addressing distro-specific issues is not a high priority for me.

[baldurk]

Can you clarify since I talked to someone on discord and it seems like I might have gotten the wrong impression - is this distro removing the package entirely so it would be impossible to follow the build instructions, or is it just a limitation of the distro's packaging rules that don't allow it to be used?

[elmarco]

Distros are moving away from / retiring pcre (see for Fedora https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Changes/PcreDeprecation)

And distros don't like for packages to bundle other projects/sources either, and go to great length to prevent it (see also https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Bundled_Libraries)

[baldurk]

OK I understand, reading that it looks like the package hasn't been removed and you can still build RenderDoc on fedora then. That is the main thing I'm concerned about - if there are issues with distro packaging rules that's not something I feel gives sufficient value to the project to justify changing otherwise working and stable code.

If the package is removed entirely in future then I can look at making some changes to ensure RenderDoc can still be compiled.

[elmarco]

No, it's not ok for Fedora, (the package has been retired due to various build issues, we are trying to get it back). https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=2254392#c2

Since SWIG is a build time only dependency iiuc, can't you ship the generated files rather than requiring SWIG & PCRE? (it's not great, but that removes the burdden from the distro)

[baldurk]

As far as I could see from your links pcre is still available on fedora and so you can still compile RenderDoc. Several posts explicitly said they were not discussing removing the package (at least not currently).

It is a build time dependency yes. That may be possible though it would require changes, so I do not plan to do that for the same reasoning as above. It wouldn't be my preferred solution if it was impossible to compile swig normally on some distros in future.