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Comment by IshKebab | Hacker News Reader

I think the main reason they don't offer a `--make-my-binary-compatible-with-the-ancient-linux-versions-users-often-have` is that GCC/glibc is a GNU project and the are philosophically against distributing software as binaries.

I don't think there's any technical reason why it couldn't be done.

To be fair to them though, Mac has the same problem. I worked at a company where we had to keep old Mac machines to produce compatible binaries, and Apple makes it hard to even download old versions of MacOS and Xcode.

I guess the difference is MacOS is easy to upgrade so you don't have to support versions from 13 years ago or whatever like you do with glibc.

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I used to think that binary compatibility benefits proprietary applications, but I'm not so sure anymore. From a commercial perspective, when we break binary compatibility (not that we want to), it's an opportunity for selling more stuff.

Many distributions do periodic mass rebuilds anyway and do not need that much long-term ABI compatibility. Binary compatibility seems mostly for people who compile their own software, but have not automated that and therefore couldn't keep up with updates if there wasn't ABI compatibility.

I agree. It's annoying for closed source apps but they generally have the resources to deal with it anyway. E.g. with Questa I can just unzip it and run it. No trouble.

It's disproportionately annoying for open source projects who don't want to waste their time dealing with this.

> I think the main reason they don't offer a `--make-my-binary-compatible-with-the-ancient-linux-versions-users-often-have` is that GCC/glibc is a GNU project and the are philosophically against distributing software as binaries.

You don't have to statically compile glibc, gcc just needs an option to tell the compiler to target say, version 2.14 instead of the latest one.

The newest glibc has all the older versions in it. That's why you can compile on say ubuntu 14 and have it run on ubuntu 24.

No like, the point is that the only reason you (and I: I do this all the time, including with my open source software... like: no judgment) want to target some old version of glibc is so you can distribute that binary to people without caring as much about what version of the OS they have; but that would be unnecessary if you just gave them the source code and have them compile their own copy for their system targeting the exact libraries they have.

Unfortunately most people don't want to bother compiling, myself included. I tried gentoo one time and it took 1 hour to compile 5 minutes worth of apt-get on ubuntu.

Only the dynamically linked bits, the statically linked startup code and libc_nonshared.a are missing from newer versions. Most programs don't need them (who needs working ELF constructors in the main program?). The libc_nonshared.a bits can be reimplemented from scratch easily enough (but we should switch them over to header-only implementations eventually).

Yes exactly. That's what the flag would do. But it doesn't exist.

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