SW Linux certification

SW Linux certification

Posted Dec 22, 2005 22:07 UTC (Thu) by anton (guest, #25547)
In reply to: HW/SW Linux certification by bkw1a
Parent article: "Just works with Linux"

>a QT- or gtk-based program written
>today won't even run under a distribution released last year.
>This is frustrating for both vendors and users.
>
>I don't know the solution to this second problem.

Possible solutions:

- Build on old distributions. The resulting binaries often work with
new libraries. However, sometimes they don't, but that can be
tested relatively easily (test it on a system with new libraries).
The disadvantage is that the program would have to restrict itself
to the ancient API.

- Use static linking. This has some disadvantages wrt security
updates and on-disk and in-memory size, but it could be supplied as
a fall-back option (the old system probably does not have the
updates anyway).

- Compile the program from source (or use a source-based distro like
Gentoo). At least that gets rid of some gratuitious
incompatibilities thrown in by linking with modern libraries,
although not from the API dependences.

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