Matt England wrote:
I'm a software developer, and I would like one set of software binaries
(applications, libraries) to be able to run across many Linux platforms,
including FedoraCore, Redhat Enterprise Linux, and Debian (much the same
way XAMPP -- http://www.apachefriends.org/en/xampp.html -- claims that
its one Linux binary distribution runs on all SuSE, Redhat, Mandrake,
and Debian).
What sort of things must I do as a developer to do this?
Should I carry as many of the dynamically-linked libraries around with
my distribution? Should these include libc/glibc in my own distribution
set?
Anything else?
Is this a worthwhile endeavor? Have people tried this before?
Obviously it appears to be a key point for XAMPP (per above) and I
suspect many more software sets. It sure would be nice for my project
to have one binary for many systems--it really cuts down on my
build-control logistics.
I'm just getting started in this investigation. I may be posting to
several different Linux communities (newsgroups, email lists, forums,
etc). I started with the Debian community because I have a build
environment on RHEL, and am porting to Debian.
Thanks for any help.
-Matt
ps: I am very familiar and have over a decade of experience with
managing software projects that make portable code across 8 different
unix variants, VMS, and several Windows flavors. Therefore, I'd like
this discussion to focus primarily on how to make the *binaries*
portable and not the _code_ portable. Thanks.
I'd say that portable binaries are even tougher than portable code.
Making your app so that it can run from its own self-contained hierarchy
from /usr/local/foo or /opt/foo would probably be the easiest. Other
than that, I believe that there are tools that spec files and try to
generate .debs (I don't mean like alien, but rather building a .deb from
an RPM spec). I imagine that there are probably also tools to do the
reverse.
Of course, if the package is not very complex, i.e., does not require
any pre- or post- install or removal actions and can just drop in and
go, then you can probably just generate one form of package and use
alien to convert to the other.
Personally, I would just try to get someone to volutneer to maintain the
software in whatever target distro you like. Personally, I am not often
compelled to go to 3rd parties for software and am much more likely to
use something if it is already in the official Debian archive. I am not
sure if users of other distros are of the same opinion, but I imagine
that many are.
-Roberto
--
Roberto C. Sanchez
http://familiasanchez.net/~roberto
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