On building portable Linux binaries

Re:On building portable Linux binaries by giancarlostoro on Saturday September 27, 2014 @08:02AM (#8376774)

I recently started using Fedora, love it, hate the lack of software. I could always contribute to packaging software not yet available, like e.g. Atom, but in the time I could waste learning to do these things I could of installed Ubuntu. I'll keep it for now, though. Maybe I'll figure out how to package and somehow release some lovely RPM's. I love Fedora, hate the lack of packages.

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Re:On building portable Linux binaries by loudmax on Saturday September 27, 2014 @09:54AM (#8377020)

I wonder if containers on the desktop would be useful for this kind of situation. You could have containers for different distributions, or even different versions of a distribution. For example, one for Ubuntu 14.04 and a different one for 13.10. The containers wouldn't do much, other than take up filesystem space, until they're needed.

This wouldn't work if the software requires a kernel module that isn't packaged for your distribution. It also wouldn't be particularly useful for a file system navigator or something that needs to see the rest of the system. That should still leave in quite a bit of useful software.

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Re:On building portable Linux binaries by pyre on Saturday September 27, 2014 @11:32AM (#8377259)

> I wonder if containers on the desktop would be useful for this kind of situation.

Wouldn't that negate the benefits of things like shared libraries?

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Re:On building portable Linux binaries by sarnowski on Saturday September 27, 2014 @12:13PM (#8377388)

http://harmful.cat-v.org/software/dynamic-linking/

..comes to my mind. Shared libraries and their advantages are at least.. controversal.

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Re:On building portable Linux binaries by pyre on Saturday September 27, 2014 @02:47PM (#8377823)

What about the benefit of being able to (e.g.) update OpenSSL across the board? Imagine if each application needed a HeartBleed update because every application had their own copy of OpenSSL. How would that be preferable?

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Re:On building portable Linux binaries by dTal on Saturday September 27, 2014 @01:21PM (#8377578)

That page is disappointingly light on actual arguments. Its points can be summed up thus:

-Sun presented a paper saying it wasn't worth it

-Plan9 doesn't use dynamic linking and some of its utilities have smaller binaries than similarly named utilities on FreeBSD

-People like dynamic linking for the same reason they believe in god

-Statically linked binaries aren't as portable as one would like.

It reads like more of a rant to be honest.

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