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0 pointsIzkata3y ago0 comments

> Snap, FlatPak, and Docker are all variations on the same basic conclusion that many developers reached long ago: "fuck it, just distribute software in the form of tarballs of entire Linux installs."

..wait a minute

> (2) We use a UPnP library called miniupnp in the current version. We have to statically link it because of issues like (1) and also because some distros were for a time stuck on a version that had security bugs that they would not upgrade because it would break other packages.

Wouldn't this solve the same problem without adding snap/etc?

0 comments

api3y ago

It solves some of the problems, but not all, and it requires a lot of testing and trial and error and setup. Sometimes libraries are hard to statically link. Sometimes you have problems with different glibc versions.

I forgot to say: some distros that people still use are too old for us to build for, so we build fully static binaries for those. But you can't really statically link glibc, so we build them on Alpine statically linked with musl. That usually works okay. It's the best we can do for the old stuff.

We've invested a lot of time in this. For most developers I totally understand "fuck it."

account423y ago

I have had a lot of success with building against old glibc version and then bundling all required libraries except system ones (glibc, libGL, libX11 etc). Anything optional needs to be loaded with dlopen/dlsym but for many things that detail is already handled by libraries like SDL. That's generally what seems to be the common solution for games (well used to be at least, today most just build against the Steam runtime and call it a day). It's really not that different from Windows IMO except that the set of base system libs that you can rely on to be backwards compatible and don't need to bundle is smaller.

You can still pacakge that distro-agnostic build up into distro-specific package formats to make updates easier for users without needing zillion of different build roots just for Linux.