Re: Build a portable linux binary?

[CROZIER Richard]

On 19/02/2019 15:34, roland65 wrote:
> John W. Eaton wrote
>> Last year I attempted to deliver a binary built with MXE that could be
>> used on just two systems, RHEL 6 and SuSE 11.  I performed the build on
>> the SuSE system because it had the older libc of the two.  My build
>> replaced as many system libraries as possible.  In the end, I think it
>> just required libc, ld.so, and a few other very low-level system
>> libraries.  I built and distributed everything else.  I was able to
>> install and run Octave on both systems.  But the customer reported
>> issues.  In the end, I just built and delivered binaries for both of the
>> systems I wanted to support.
>
> OK, I see...
>
> However, I've seen this project:
> https://github.com/wheybags/glibc_version_header
> That seems interesting but they say they don't support C++ yet, and there
> are also some issues...
>
>

I tried using this on another, much simpler, project and unfortunately
couldn't get it to work. This could be more to do with my limitations
than the tool itself though.

I think problem is Octave has many dependencies, and some of them will
actually require (or at least pretend they require) certain libc
versions, with MXE it is also not easy to pick and choose versions of
packages, you need a set that all work together.

I mean, there's also this:

https://phusion.github.io/holy-build-box/

Portable binaries on Linux are a real PITA, hence the existence of the
project you link to, Holy Build Box (linked above), Snap packages,
Flatpak, Appimage, Launchpad Ubuntu PPAs, MXE Octave, etc. etc. It's a
nightmare really if you just want something easy for users who don't
know how to compile stuff to install, without waiting 3 years for it to
appear in the package repositories.

Flatpak seems good, except that you won't be able to install any Octave
packages from Octave Forge that need to link to libraries on the
computer, e.g. the netcdf package.

If JWE can't make it work, it's probably pretty difficult.

Richard

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