Statically linked binaries (was re: PSPP on CentOS 6)

[Alan Mead]

On 2/25/2016 11:39 PM, John Darrington wrote:
> On Thu, Feb 25, 2016 at 03:41:46PM -0600, Alan Mead wrote:
>      
>      This succeeded and in some quick testing psppire seems to work. 
>      Thanks!  Is there any hope for more recent versions?
>     
> On CentOS 6 I'm afraid not.  
>
> We could backport some bugs I suppose and maintain a separate branch,
> if there was enough demand.
>
> Otherwise you should be looking to upgrade to CentOS 7.

I installed Fedora 23 on an older machine, so I'll be on the bleeding
edge (or close to it). I haven't gotten around to trying to make the
latest PSPP, but there's a package for 0.8.5.

I use some Linux software that was distributed (by a developer who
learned to code on Windows) as both source code and binaries where the
binary was statically linked.  Much like a Window executable, it still
runs years after the author compiled it.  (In fact, gcc and SWIG have
moved on and the source no longer compiles.) 

Other than (a) "that's not the way we do it" and (b) the issues of
trusting binaries, what's the downside of distributing a statically
linked PSPP?  Wouldn't that allow me to run the latest PSPP on my CentOS
6 machine?

-Alan

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