Background

In the FSL we use spack to manage our software packages. So even though we're on Rocky 8, we can use GCC 12.2 via spack, for example. But when we tried to do this, we'd get a weird build error when building Trick:

In file included from parse_format.c:3:
/usr/include/stdio.h:33:10: fatal error: stddef.h: No such file or directory
 #include <stddef.h>

So we just stuck with the system-installed GCC 8.5.

Cause

Several of the makefiles in trick_source/data_products/* hard-code the following:

CC = cc
CPP = c++

So the makefiles are stomping on the new compiler versions that we're trying to load via spack (or any other package manager). Because spack isn't actually updating $PATH for cc, it's just setting $CC and $CPP, this means that we're calling the system /usr/bin/cc rather than the /path/to/gcc12/cc that we should be. We're mixing compiler versions for different parts of Trick, and eventually the build fails.

Solution

We should be able to change those makefile lines to

CC ?= cc
CPP ?= c++

That way, if a user loads a new GCC via a package manager, Trick will use that GCC. Otherwise, we'll default to whatever's first on the user's path (probably the system-installed version).

FYI: @sharmeye @ddj116 @hchen99. I have some local fixes but I don't think I have permission to push a new branch to Trick.