On Wed, Nov 22, 2006 at 11:39:35AM +0100, Patrice Dumas wrote: > On Wed, Nov 22, 2006 at 11:34:14AM +0100, Arjan van de Ven wrote: > > > > actually static linking DECREASES that portability !! > > Are you saying that you can compile a program dynamically and run it > on old redhat, centos, old debian, mandrake and fedora core boxes? > I tried, it fails, while statically linked programs are fine (at least > numerical models). Yes and no. Assuming if you link statically on very recent distro that your program will work on any old Linux distro is just very bad assumption. E.g. each glibc is configured for some minimal kernel version, if you attempt to run the program on older kernel some functions will crash, misbehave or the program won't start at all. E.g. FC5+ glibc is configured for 2.6.9 and later kernels, so running it on say FC1 just isn't going to fly. If you want to create a program that will work on older distributions (within reasonable limits, e.g. glibc 2.0 or libc5 or a.out stuff isn't supported anymore in recent FCs), just compile/link against the oldest glibc etc. you want to support, whether by installing an old distro in the chroot or by installing and linking against something like compat-glibc (these days only present in RHEL, but could very well be revived for FC as well), using compat-gcc (on FC6 that has e.g. a side-effect of using -Wl,--hash-style=sysv etc.). Jakub -- fedora-devel-list mailing list fedora-devel-list@xxxxxxxxxx https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-devel-list
