this post was submitted on 31 May 2024
30 points (87.5% liked)

Linux

48372 readers
1436 users here now

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).

Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.

Rules

Related Communities

Community icon by Alpár-Etele Méder, licensed under CC BY 3.0

founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
 

It's been a long day and I'm probably not in the best state of mind to be asking this question, but have you guys solved packaging yet?

I want to ship an executable with supporting files in a compressed archive, much like the Windows exe-in-a-zip pattern. I can cross-compile a Win32 C program using MinGW that will always use baseline Win32 functionality, but if I try to build for Linux I run into the whole dependency versioning situation, specifically glibc fixing its symbol version to whichever Linux I happen to be building from at the time. But if I try to static link with musl, the expectation is that everything is static linked, including system libraries that really shouldn't be.

AppImage is in the ballpark of what I'm looking for, and I've heard that Zig works as a compatibility-enhancing frontend if you're compiling C. I'd just like something simple that runs 99% of the time for non-technical end users and isn't bloated with dependencies I can't keep track of. (No containers.) Is this easily achievable?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] iopq 9 points 6 months ago

If you want something simple most people can run, use flatpak. AppImage often fails for me because I'm missing some file.so