Distro packagers do nothing for you if:

- Your app isn't licensed in the way you like

- You don't want to provide the source code to your app

- They don't find your app interesting enough

- They don't agree with your app's policies

Static linking is a much better response for actually getting the program running on Linux systems but this still leaves out the "is there a way I can package it once for Linux" problem.

Now if it's a CLI only utility/service type tool it's a different story.

Fine, build your own package.

  # dpkg-deb --build ./src/ mydeb.deb

Stick your dependencies etc in ./src/DEBIAN/control

Or just distribute a tar with your application.

I used to have to distribute a cross platform java progam. It was horrendous creating the MSI on windows. The linux and osx versions were trivial

Java? Shouldn't that just be JAR + JVM?

Called native executables too, launch icons/shortcuts etc, jvm version detection

Deployed by apt/yum/mdm andslme crappy windows thing. The latter was the problem.

Every night we have a job (run by jenkins I think) download the latest ffmpeg code, add some non-approved patched, and cross compile to static binaries for x64 linux, osx, and windows (we've dropped the 32 bit linux build)

It's not hard to make a static binary.

On the other hand most of the "software" I write - mainly shell scripts - includes things like apache configuration, requires other applications (like apache, iperf, tcpdump, lldp, etc)

I want to deploy these to multiple boxes, I want them versioned, I want them easy to update, I want to know what version is installed. All of this is handled by a 10 line config file in a .deb.

Except, if you need to pay rent and put your kids through college, shipping source tarballs is going to significantly reduce revenue for a small developer. (It's sad, but it does.)

A few years ago I tried to compile a C++ project into a static binary which would work on both Ubuntu and CentOS.

Long story short, it wasn't possible. Because the latest versions of Ubuntu and CentOS at the time used different versions of glibc which were mutually incompatible.

If you statically link, it doesn't matter what version of glibc is on the target machine, because it's not used.

You would think so, but it's not true. I struggled with this for a few days before giving up (after finding articles which stated that this is really going where nobody went before)

> Static linking of glibc is not supported on Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

https://developers.redhat.com/blog/2016/02/17/upgrading-the-...

I don't pretend to know a lot about linking files, but I just checked an old static ffmbc binary I had lying around

  :/tmp$ file ffmbc 
    ffmbc: ELF 64-bit LSB  executable, x86-64, version 1 (SYSV), 
  statically linked, for GNU/Linux 2.6.15, BuildID[sha1]=...., stripped
  :/tmp$ ldd ffmbc 
	not a dynamic executable
 

It runs on the following libc versions:

  ldd (GNU libc) 2.12 (Centos 6.9)
  ldd (Ubuntu EGLIBC 2.19-0ubuntu6.14) 2.19 (ubuntu 14.04)
  ldd (Ubuntu GLIBC 2.23-0ubuntu10) 2.23 (Ubuntu 16.04)

I'm fairly sure it ran on distributions as old as ubuntu 8.04

You're supposed to bundle a fixed version of glibc with your application.