Practical Problems with distribution D projects

[Adam D. Ruppe]

On Wednesday, 26 February 2014 at 18:52:55 UTC, Assaf Gordon 
wrote:
> It might be "generally available" when you assume you're 
> dealing with "recent" "desktop" versions of linux.

I've had good luck with them on my servers too but I haven't used 
many of the distros.

But I have had the same libc version problems you see too.

> I think that low-level libraries (e.g. ld-linux, libc, 
> linux-gate, librt, libpthread) are tightly coupled to the 
> system (and the kernel), you really don't want to run 
> incompatible ones on an arbitrary linux system.

If this were true, static linking would be useless! Static 
linking is basically just copying the library functions into your 
binary instead of leaving a reference to the library.

> I'd argue the opposite: it is a D problem (or 
> libphobos2/druntime problem, which is a major part of D).

I'm not sure because searching the web for people having this 
problem with C++ suggests the fix is to update the libc on their 
development computer. So that might work with us too.... but then 
again if it breaks on your computer too who knows.

> I have tried it with C-based projects, and based on my humble 
> experience, anything except a real static binary will 
> eventually cause problems to users.

I agree, this is why I prefer distributing Windows exes :) but if 
you know your target computers it might not be a big problem, 
just compile with a libc close enough to them.