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Loved his rant on glibc, etc. breaking stuff. I've been saying this myself for years. Really static linking is the only way to make a binary for Linux that will

by shaurz 12y ago

Loved his rant on glibc, etc. breaking stuff. I've been saying this myself for years. Really static linking is the only way to make a binary for Linux that will work on any distribution.

kev009 12y ago
It's interesting that a lot of this isn't a problem in FreeBSD due to the Base system and ABI guarantees. FreeBSD Ports also averts many of the grumblings about distro packaging.
- asuffield 12y ago
  Having worked with FreeBSD before in a Real Product, I'd have to say that the main reason FreeBSD doesn't have a problem with this is because most of it hasn't changed since the 1980s. Not even because it's particularly good, but just because nobody wants to work on large tracts of the codebase. The normal feeling is "bwah, this is complicated and ugly. I'll just leave it alone..."
fosap 12y ago
I'm not sure, but doesn't the opensuse build service tries to solve these problems? I haven't used it, but I think i slurps source code and builds packages for multiple distributions. And I absolutely agree with Linus view on linking. I just tried to install ffmpeg on opensuse on a desktop pc. All I wanted was one statically linked binary. I had to dig a wiki, follow outdated build instructions (not nearly enough dependencies where listed, I had to go back several times, configure runs like 20 minutes), it took hours. For one simple binary. FFmpeg could put on their homepage.
- rodgerd 12y ago
  Build services are great if you have the source to everything. But the reality is I've got software I paid for on Linux that doesn't run on a modern distro after a decade, and software I paid for on Windows that's 15 years old and runs fine.
- shaurz 12y ago
  That doesn't solve the problem for commercial software and only works around the problem for open source. In fact I ran in to this problem today. We build on CentOS 5 in order to support some customers who still use it. Unfortunately we linked against libssl.so.6 which is no longer available on newer distributions. We can't even statically link due to licence issues.

by shaurz 12y ago

Loved his rant on glibc, etc. breaking stuff. I've been saying this myself for years. Really static linking is the only way to make a binary for Linux that will work on any distribution.

kev009 12y ago

It's interesting that a lot of this isn't a problem in FreeBSD due to the Base system and ABI guarantees. FreeBSD Ports also averts many of the grumblings about distro packaging.

asuffield 12y ago
Having worked with FreeBSD before in a Real Product, I'd have to say that the main reason FreeBSD doesn't have a problem with this is because most of it hasn't changed since the 1980s. Not even because it's particularly good, but just because nobody wants to work on large tracts of the codebase. The normal feeling is "bwah, this is complicated and ugly. I'll just leave it alone..."

fosap 12y ago

I'm not sure, but doesn't the opensuse build service tries to solve these problems? I haven't used it, but I think i slurps source code and builds packages for multiple distributions. And I absolutely agree with Linus view on linking. I just tried to install ffmpeg on opensuse on a desktop pc. All I wanted was one statically linked binary. I had to dig a wiki, follow outdated build instructions (not nearly enough dependencies where listed, I had to go back several times, configure runs like 20 minutes), it took hours. For one simple binary. FFmpeg could put on their homepage.

rodgerd 12y ago
Build services are great if you have the source to everything. But the reality is I've got software I paid for on Linux that doesn't run on a modern distro after a decade, and software I paid for on Windows that's 15 years old and runs fine.
shaurz 12y ago
That doesn't solve the problem for commercial software and only works around the problem for open source. In fact I ran in to this problem today. We build on CentOS 5 in order to support some customers who still use it. Unfortunately we linked against libssl.so.6 which is no longer available on newer distributions. We can't even statically link due to licence issues.