Re: Build a portable linux binary?

[John W. Eaton]

On 2/19/19 10:50 AM, CROZIER Richard wrote:

> Portable binaries on Linux are a real PITA, hence the existence of the
> project you link to, Holy Build Box (linked above), Snap packages,
> Flatpak, Appimage, Launchpad Ubuntu PPAs, MXE Octave, etc. etc. It's a
> nightmare really if you just want something easy for users who don't
> know how to compile stuff to install, without waiting 3 years for it to
> appear in the package repositories.

Also, the point of mxe-octave was initially to build Octave for Windows. 
 Using it to build for Linux systems was something that happened later, 
and only because I needed a way to build Octave and all dependencies on 
systems like RHEL 5 that didn't have compilers that were new enough to 
build Octave and that also lacked the necessary dependencies as 
packages.  If those were my systems, I'd upgrade them to a newer version 
of the OS and install all the necessary dependencies from the 
distribution.  It's extremely frustrating to me that people insist on 
sticking with obsolete versions (5-6 years old) of the OS but want to 
run the latest versions of applications on them.  This makes little 
sense to me but it seems to be fairly common.

jwe