That seems like a great reason to run a virtual machine and sandbox a more
modern linux to run those specific apps.


On Thu, Mar 20, 2014 at 8:58 PM, Keith Lofstrom <[email protected]>wrote:

> On Tue, Mar 18, 2014 at 04:43:53PM -0700, Tim wrote:
> > Your software distribution does you a grand service by managing this
> > for you.  Use a distro that does it right, buy into it and use their
> > framework, and many of the headaches you describe become minor.
>
> On Wed, Mar 19, 2014 at 08:31:38AM -0700, Paul Heinlein wrote:
> > For example, if there were a vulnerability in libcrypt, roughly 300
> > binaries on one of my CentOS 6 servers would have to be rebuilt,
> > repackaged, and reinstalled.
>
> Wise words, thanks for that.  I suppose what I should want is
> a "multilibrary" wrapper and package updater for new packages.
>
> I run a Red Hat Enterprise clone, Scientific Linux 6.5 .  It is
> stodgy (equivalent to Fedora 12, a 4 year old base kernel) - but
> it will get security updates until 2023, supported by Fermilabs
> even if Red Hat goes away (or worse, gets bought by Larry
> Ellison).  The problem is, almost all recent third party not-in-
> the-standard-distro packages want later major revs of libraries
> with new features; I can't compile or run those because the
> dependencies collide.
>
> So what if I could run different families of programs with
> different runtime loaders, which looks at the program's requests
> for libraries and other runtime requirements and pulls them from
> someplace besides the mainline /usr/lib ?  This would require
> more disk space, more backup time and storage, and many nightly
> update processes, but it would mean that old stuff that is
> difficult to migrate wouldn't have to, and I would never see
> dependency conflicts when loading a new package.
>
> So, I might be running SL6.5, Fedora 20, and Ubuntu 14.04
> packages all on the same machine, and migrating binaries from
> older to newer distros gradually, as new very long term support
> versions become available.  New machines could be installed with
> the latest SL6.5 (or SL7.1 or 8.1 when those become available)
> with similar linker/wrappers backwards to older libraries.
>
> Yes, this might leave some security holes in some of the obscure
> web-facing components, but for those of us with a gigantic
> /usr/local/bin and ~/bin , not being able to easily keep old
> capabilities represents a larger threat to productivity.
>
> Keith
>
> --
> Keith Lofstrom          [email protected]
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-- 
Darren R. Couch
[email protected]
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