On 8/21/18 6:25 PM, Grant Edwards wrote: > There are a handful of 3rd party, closed-source apps that I run on my > Gentoo systems. Often they're available for RedHat or Ubuntu, > sometimes for "generic" Linux. > > The apps for "generic" Linux usually run without too much trouble, > since they tend to include most of the libraries they need bundled > with the package or linked statically with the executable. > > Apps packaged for RedHat or Ubuntu tend to rely on the host for far > more libraries (e.g. Qt or Gtk and underlying X11 stuff). Sometimes I > have to copy some libraries from a RedHat or Ubuntu system and set > LD_LIBRARY_PATH to point to that set of "private" libraries to get > these apps running. Manually figuring out which libraries are > required is a time-consuming and error-prone process. One of the ones > I use regularly is going to stop working one of these days because it > depends on qtwebkit-4.8, which has been EOL'ed on Gentoo. [So I'll > have to grab one more library from an Ubuntu system.] > > I've been thinking about trying to automate this by installing the app > on an Ubuntu or RedHat system and then running a bash script that uses > ldd et alia to find and bundle up the set of required library files. > (How deep to recurse in the tree of library dependencies will be a big > question.) > > If I understand what containers are (never used them), it occurs to me > that if I bundle up everything all the way down to libc and libgcc, I > might as well be using a container, right? > > Is this a good use case for containers, or is there some other way to > do this? >
An alternative might be to use flatpak where applicable? https://flatpak.org/setup/Gentoo/ I too am interested in a direct answer to your question. Surely options for gentoo, for things not in the portage tree or overlays, needs to be be robustly developed, imho. hth, James
