[opensource-dev] Building GTK+ and friends with autobuild new tools

Henri Beauchamp sldev at free.fr
Fri Jul 24 01:16:50 PDT 2015


On Thu, 23 Jul 2015 21:47:36 -0500, Nicky Perian wrote:

> Thanks for taking time to provide a thoughtful reply.
> I agree, it is not a viewer for older distributions.

I don't consider 3 years old distributions as "old" ones... If you do,
then What would you say about Windows XP, Vista, or even Windows 7 ?
:-D

> However, by packaging libstdc++ with the viewer  lib/ it runs very
> well on debian jessie (current stable), Ubuntu 14.04 and Linux Mint
> 17.1 and 17.2. and several other distributions.

Try Ubuntu 12 (2012, i.e. 3 years old only)... Or Mandriva derivatives
Mageia, Rosa, OpenMandriva, etc, most of which had their two last
releases published in 2012 and 2014 (the 2014 release will work, not
the 2012)...

I consider that, for any given distribution, at the very least the
two releases that came before the current one should be able to run
my viewer.

> Kokua linux 64 bit test viewer build with these libraries has been
> out for several weeks and there are with very few problems reports.
> Opensuse being one of the few. IMO if you run opensuse w/KDE you
> might as well install windows.

Pardon ?... I'd never run Windows. And no, I'm not using KDE either,
but even KDE users would not drop Linux for Windoze. :-P

Telling to OpenSuse users, "hey, just use Windows instead to run my
viewer !" is just as lame as Linux support drop by LL... You don't
want to become as lame as LL, do you ?... :-D

> Here is a code snip from one of the libraries
> .../...
> All of the gtk and friends libraries will build on gcc-4.6. Just
> change 4.9 to 4.6 atthe beginning of the linux sections of the
> script.

This is not *just* a problem with gcc... You need to provide pre-
built glib and gtk (& ancillaries) versions which are *inferior or
equal* to the ones of oldest distribution you want the viewer to run
onto, else you will invariably get unresolved symbols at runtime,
because neither glib nor gtk are packaged with the viewer (which
therefore uses the libraries of the system it is ran onto).

Also, you need to make sure that the glibc version of the system
you build your pre-built libraries onto is old enough to run on
the oldest targeted distribution. To give you an example, software
such as Firefox, Google Earth, VirtualBox, Blender etc (i.e.
software that come as, or are also available as non-distribution
specific packaged binaries, just like SL viewers) can all run on a
glibc v2.11 system (my oldest Linux system runs them), and perhaps
even older (I won't be surprised if they can still run on a glibc
2.10 system).

Regards,

Henri.


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