Re: Build a portable linux binary?

[John W. Eaton]

On 2/19/19 5:33 AM, CROZIER Richard wrote:

> Here's a link to what Tatsuro is talking about:
>
> https://wiki.octave.org/MXE
>
> Note that this is a fork of the original MXE which you will find elsewhere.
>
> You could perhaps use MXE to do a static build on an old Linux system
> (e.g. old ubuntu in a VM).

I doubt that it is possible to build Octave and all dependencies as 
static libraries.

> The main issue with portable binaries is
> libc, which can't be statically linked which is why you need to build on
> a system with an old version of libc, and hope this is ok for all the
> new versions of packages downloaded by MXE. The resulting binaries
> should work on any system with the same or newer version of libc (I
> think?), unless the packages require features not present in that
> version of libc.

Last year I attempted to deliver a binary built with MXE that could be 
used on just two systems, RHEL 6 and SuSE 11.  I performed the build on 
the SuSE system because it had the older libc of the two.  My build 
replaced as many system libraries as possible.  In the end, I think it 
just required libc, ld.so, and a few other very low-level system 
libraries.  I built and distributed everything else.  I was able to 
install and run Octave on both systems.  But the customer reported 
issues.  In the end, I just built and delivered binaries for both of the 
systems I wanted to support.

jwe