SELF: Anatomy of an (alleged) failure

Yes, binary compatibility is easier than most people seem to think, but it is also very frequently done wrong (including by Mr. Gordon, I generally have make stuff he's packaged stop using at least 2 or 3 bundled libraries before it works (if I'm not using the Gentoo ebuild of it...), he tends to bundle libstdc++ and libgcc, as well as SDL... all of these have had a stable ABI for a while now, and if the ABI changes, so does the soname so distros can ship a compat package (which they generally do) so there's no need to distribute them, the only people who benefit would be people with old versions that are missing new API that the game uses, it's irritating. I bought the Humble Bundle and all the games that weren't flash based didn't start due to the bundled libraries causing breakage)

These days you mostly have to worry about make sure you compile on a system that has old enough versions of everything that you're not using newer versions of stuff than your users will have (eg use g++ 4.3 so that Gentoo users that use the stable compiler don't have to install newer gcc and mess about with LD_LIBRARY_PATH so your app can find the newer libstdc++, it's nice since g++ 4.4 and 4.5's libstdc++ is backwards ABI compatible with all the older ones (4.0 and later, 3.x is a separate issue, but you can both available at once so you just need a compat package)) You don't even need to statically link many things, unless you have reason to believe they will not be packaged by your user's distro.