portable applications
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. Is there a simple way to statically link the esoteric aspects of my GUI -- John Zavgren 603-371-0513 (home) 603-801-2094 (cell) j...@zavgren.com - I want to retire with dignity like my father, not like the thousands of productive people who's careers ended when he eliminated the RD department to inflate short term profits. ___ gtk-app-devel-list mailing list gtk-app-devel-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/gtk-app-devel-list
Re: portable applications
On Wed, Jun 24, 2009 at 5:41 AM, John Zavgrenj...@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 ___ gtk-app-devel-list mailing list gtk-app-devel-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/gtk-app-devel-list
Re: portable applications
John Zavgren wrote: My intuition tells me that there must be a better way to build an application that will run on more than one Linux machine. Is there a simple way to statically link the esoteric aspects of my GUI You can use the ldd command to see what your binary is linking to. The biggest problem you will run into is that your version of GTK may be newer than the version of GTK on the machines you are trying to target. For example RHEL 5 probably is about a year or more behind Ubuntu in terms of GTK version. That said, GTK is supposed to be ABI stable for the entire 2.x series. In other words as long as you don't use an API that was introduced along the line, it should run fine with older libraries. In practice it may not always work. What most companies do that distribute GTK-based software is to ship the GTK runtime libraries with their app and using a script fall back to them (using the LD_LIBRARY_PATH environment variable) when the system GTK will not suffice. However to make that work well you have to make sure you're not trying to link against a version of GLIBC that is newer than the target OS. I think, however, that your best bet is to give your coworkers the tarball and have them do a ./configure ; make ; make install. With source code available, that is the easiest, best, and most portable way. So to summarize, the things you have to worry about are: - target GLIBC version - target GTK2 version - target architecture (32-bit vs 64-bit) ___ gtk-app-devel-list mailing list gtk-app-devel-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/gtk-app-devel-list
Re: portable applications
Date: Wed, 24 Jun 2009 08:41:50 -0400 From: John Zavgren j...@zavgren.com Subject: portable applications To: gtk-app-devel-list@gnome.org Message-ID: 8bea388a0906240541p1bc747c7x174a9b35828b5...@mail.gmail.com Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 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. Is there a simple way to statically link the esoteric aspects of my GUI Another approach you could take is to figure out how to make a .deb and .rpm files that list the packages for the libraries your app needs as dependencies. Not exactly the same thing you are talking about, but very much related. I wish I could speak from experience, but this is still on my mental to-do list. It is a sign of progress when someone uses portable to mean support for more than one linux distro. I would not recommend statically linking gtk. Most of the trick here is 1) portable build system (I endorse SCons), and 2) configuring / installing the required pieces on a build box for a supported target. Actually, if you get that far, the .deb / .rpm is not required, but a nice finishing touch. Binary portability is somewhat of a hot-button issue for many people now. It's not really a strong point for Linux. Sure it would be nice, but it's better to not require/expect its availability. For instance, there will always be different CPU architectures. Or if you are like many in my boat, you also still have windows builds. -- www.thomasstover.com ___ gtk-app-devel-list mailing list gtk-app-devel-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/gtk-app-devel-list
