Binary compatibility on Linux

[Jacob Carlborg]

What's the best way to achieve binary compatibility on Linux? For 
example, if I compile an application on, say Ubuntu 12.04, it will most 
likely not run on any older versions of Ubuntu but it will run on future 
versions.

My current approach to solve this is to compile the application in the 
oldest version of Ubuntu I can find, in this case 6.x. This is starting 
to get a bit problematic:

* The integration with VirtuaBox (I'm running Ubuntu as a guest) is 
pretty bad
* DMD won't run of out of the box, I need to compile it. This is also 
making DVM basically useless
* I can't clone the dlang repositories due to having a very old version 
of git installed
* I can't compile git, I haven't investigated in why but probably due to 
the system is too old

Is there some compiler/linker flags I can use when building to make the 
executable compatibility with older versions of Linux?

Or is there a better way to solve this?

-- 
/Jacob Carlborg