Re: "portable" applications

[Dan Kegel <dank kegel com>]

On Wed, Jun 24, 2009 at 5:41 AM, John Zavgren<john zavgren com> wrote:
> Greetings:
> I wrote a Glade-3/GTK2/G++ application on a ubuntu machine, and the
> application works great. In fact it works so well that my colleagues want to
> use it. Ujnfortunately, they are not using ubuntu (and neither was I until I
> started developing my GUI. I chose ubuntu because it seemed to support GUI
> development.)
>
> I tried running my app on a Red Hat machine and the app failed because of an
> unresolved external reference,,, missing shared object file.
>
> No big deal. I attempted to statically link my app with the assistance of
> "strace", the doctrinaire approach with embedded systems. That opened
> pandoras box! The number of references to shared object files was
> astounding.
> My intuition tells me that there must be a better way to build an
> application that will run on more than one Linux machine.

There is.  Check out http://ldn.linuxfoundation.org/lsb
(Or, as a first approximation, build your app on an old
version of linux, like Ubuntu 6.06.  But lsb is a better way
to go if you can do it.)
You don't need to create lsb packages; just building with
the lsb sdk will make your program more portable.

> Is there a simple way to statically link the esoteric aspects of my GUI

In general, static linking doesn't work well these days.  glibc
and several other libraries use dynamic linking at runtime.
- Dan