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?
A solution I’ve used for the glibc problem, is to build on an older distribution in a chroot. There is also this project which might be of use to pick a specific version of glibc. The project README also explain how to do it manually.
As for distribution, I prefer something like makeself.sh, that installs to either ~/.local/ or if it is to be installed system-wide to /usr/local or /opt. The concept is just a small shell script appended with a compressed archive, it is easy to modify and even create by hand using standard tools like cat. This is a method widely used by native Linux games.
I’ve built a Dockerfile that does a hybrid of solution 1 and AppImage building.
It compiles the software with an older Debian release, then packages the software in a Python AppImage with necessary dependencies installed and the proper dynamic libs copied.
Using containers for build environments is probably my favorite use of containers.
I have an application I build for Linux, Mac and Windows and frankly building two or three Linux builds in containers is easier than the Windows and Mac builds alone. A github action automates it easily.
I’ll probably have to use chroot or docker. I tried with glibc force link but when I objdump -T I see symbols that slip through with newer glibc, even when they’re .symver’d in the header. That project hasn’t been updated in a long time.