Re: Statically linked binaries (was re: PSPP on CentOS 6)

[Ben Pfaff]

On Fri, Mar 04, 2016 at 11:57:09AM -0600, Alan Mead wrote:
> On 2/25/2016 11:39 PM, John Darrington wrote:
> > On Thu, Feb 25, 2016 at 03:41:46PM -0600, Alan Mead wrote:
> >      
> >      This succeeded and in some quick testing psppire seems to work. 
> >      Thanks!  Is there any hope for more recent versions?
> >     
> > On CentOS 6 I'm afraid not.  
> >
> > We could backport some bugs I suppose and maintain a separate branch,
> > if there was enough demand.
> >
> > Otherwise you should be looking to upgrade to CentOS 7.
> 
> I installed Fedora 23 on an older machine, so I'll be on the bleeding
> edge (or close to it). I haven't gotten around to trying to make the
> latest PSPP, but there's a package for 0.8.5.
> 
> I use some Linux software that was distributed (by a developer who
> learned to code on Windows) as both source code and binaries where the
> binary was statically linked.  Much like a Window executable, it still
> runs years after the author compiled it.  (In fact, gcc and SWIG have
> moved on and the source no longer compiles.) 
> 
> Other than (a) "that's not the way we do it" and (b) the issues of
> trusting binaries, what's the downside of distributing a statically
> linked PSPP?  Wouldn't that allow me to run the latest PSPP on my CentOS
> 6 machine?

Yes.

I'm not personally a fan of distributing statically linked binaries
because it means that I have to track down a lot of source code in case
someone asks for it.  But it makes perfect sense for personal use.