Re: Bug#1035904: dpkg currently warning about merged-usr systems (revisited)
Jeremy Stanley <fungi@yuggoth.org> writes:
> Throwing another common one on the heap, similar to the previous Steam
> example, Python wheels with compiled extensions are often distributed on
> PyPI for a fictional "manylinux" platform which indicates they're
> intended to be usable on most GNU/Linux distributions (though in their
> case, they compile on ~ancient RHEL versions to achieve that). One way
> that manulinux wheels are less like Rust or Go is that they typically
> don't use static compilation, but rather vendor in additional
> dynamically-linked libs which are unlikely to be present on the target
> installations.
Yeah, I've not been digging too deeply into cases like this since they
wouldn't be affected by the original proposal that started this off (it
wouldn't change binaries compiled with normal Debian tools or change what
ABI Debian can execute), but if we move into the more general question of
"does anyone care about building binaries on one Linux system and running
them on another," I think there are quite a lot of examples.
Another one just from the Python world is conda, which provides a parallel
set of pre-compiled libraries in addition to the Python modules and
expects to be able to install and run them on arbitrary systems outside of
a chroot or container, just by manipulating the dynamic loader search
path. Conda is very widely used in scientific computing, where a lot of
use cases require Python libraries with substantial underlying C library
components that often do not have compatible or sufficiently optimized
versions packaged for the underlying distribution.
There are also, obviously, non-free software use cases galore, including I
suspect some in the Debian non-free archive, where binaries built on other
Linux distributions are being run on Debian systems. I remember, in a
previous job, changing a few files in /etc to convince the Oracle
installer that a Debian system was actually a Red Hat system so that it
would run, and the resulting binaries then worked fine (and it would have
been a huge problem for us if they hadn't). I think Oracle subsequently
added more support for Debian, or at least Ubuntu, but I'm sure there are
other cases like that still around today.
--
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org) <https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
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