Re: Can one build a static vile easily?

[Brendan O'Dea]

On Wed, 12 Jul 2023 at 19:44, Chris Green <cl@isbd.net> wrote:
> Is there any way to build a 'static' version of vile fairly easily?

This is a pretty easy one to answer: easily?  no.

Part of this is because the current configure is not set up for it, so
you would need to muck about with the generated makefile; the other
part is that glibc doesn't really support static linking.  That second
one is a bit complicated, hence the "really" part: in order to support
nsswitch, glibc loads some dynamic components, even when linked
statically.  Additionally, there are a bunch of dependent files for
locale support, which wouldn't be included in a statically linked
binary.

> ... or a way to create something like an appimage?

I've not had much experience with appimage/snap/flatpak/whatever, but
the main reason that I looked for a replacement for Slackware (which
is the distro that I started with), and ended up with Debian, was that
I wanted to be able to support distribution of software to multiple
machines, and wanted some kind of packaging that wasn't a manually
created tarball.

I'm assuming that you have a bunch of machines that you need to
manage, and that you don't want to build vile individually on all of
them.  Assuming that there is a small number of target platforms, I'd
suggest building packages for those platforms.  The vile source has
packaging options for a number of platforms in the `package`
subdirectory.

--bod