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> there is no good technical reason why I shouldn't be able to distribute the same ELF binary to every distro Oh, your app also works on every single kernel, e

> there is no good technical reason why I shouldn't be able to distribute the same ELF binary to every distro Oh, your app also works on every single kernel, every different version of external applications, and supports every file tree of every distro? Sounds like you added a crap-ton of portability to your app in order to support all those distros. > I can't feasibly write a package for every package manager in existence. But you could create 3 packages for the 3 most commonly used package managers of your users. Or 3 tarballs of your app compiled for 3 platforms using Docker for the build environment. Which would take about a day or two, and simultaneously provide testing of your app in your users' environments.

duped 6y ago
Yes this not that hard if you are statically linking as much as possible. The magic of stable syscalls. Variance between glibc is the biggest headache but musl libc solves a lot of the problems. Have you ever actually tried that last step that you're suggesting? It's actually really time consuming and expensive to maintain that infrastructure due to oddities between distros, like glibc or unsupported compiler versions. Statically linking is easier than redoing all the work of setting up and tearing down developer environments just because one platform has a different #define in libc. It's also cheaper when your images are not small and you're paying for your bandwidth/storage.