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Comment by Arnavion | Hacker News Reader

If you want to build binaries for a distro, build in that distro. If that distro has a Docker image, it's as simple as:

    docker run -v "$PWD:/src" olddistro:version /src/build.sh

$dayjob supports distros as old as CentOS 7 and as new as Ubuntu 22.04 this way.

Compiling on one distro and then expecting it to work on another distro is a foolhardy errand. Libraries have different versions, different paths (eg /usr/lib vs /usr/lib64 vs /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/ vs...), and different compile-time configuration (eg openssl engines directory) across distros.

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> If you want to build binaries for a distro, build in that distro.

> Compiling on one distro and then expecting it to work on another distro is a foolhardy errand.

This is why Windows, with all its issues, is still relevant in 2022. I got tired of updating my distro and software stopping to work. If you are on happy walled garden land of the main repository you're fine. When you need some specialized software or something that is not being maintained anymore, good luck. And at the end of the day, people just want their work done.

This is why Windows with all bloat, advertising, tracking, security issues (no click RCE in 2022, wtf) STILL is going strong.

> Compiling on one distro and then expecting it to work on another distro is a foolhardy errand.

Only if you link random libs you find in on the system. The base system libs making up a Linux desktop (glibc, xlib, libasound, libpulse*, libGL, etc.) all are pretty good about maintaining backwards compatibility so you only need to build against the oldest version you want to support and it will run on all. Other libraries you should distribute yourself or even statically link with their symbols hidden. This approach works for many projects.

CentOS 7 is from 2014. That isn’t very old.

It has a few old things unique to it in our support matrix. It's the only distro with openssl 1.0 so a bunch of API and related things are different. It's also the only distro where systemd socket activation doesn't work if your service has more than one socket, because its version of systemd predates the LISTEN_FDNAMES env var.

Also, it is old enough that it's going out of LTS soon.

CentOS 7 may have been released in 2014, but the software it shipped was already quite old then.

As a datapoint, CentOS Stream 9 [0], which was released in 2021, and which RHEL 9 (released in May 2022) is based on, is already ~60% out of date according to repology: https://repology.org/repository/centos_stream_9.

Also: In computer time, 8 years is "very old". That's longer than the "mainstream support" window for Windows 7 was (from 2009 to 2015), and about as long as the mainstream support window for Windows XP (from 2001 to 2009).

[0]: CentOS "Stream" has a different release model and appears to be a bit of a rolling release as I understand it? But that would cause it to be more up-to-date, not less.

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