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by comex5 hours ago |
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upvoteby account425 hours ago|
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Yes this is just asking for trouble - and all it does is solve a problem that doesn't really exist. Just dynamically link against the oldest glibc you want to support. Its annoying that Linux toolchains don't have built in easy mode support for that but its much easier to deal with than this thing will be when it breaks.

It's also not just new symbols, the loader semantics also aren't static and new enough libraries may not support older semantics - e.g. the loader used to use DT_HASH entries for symbol resolution but now they are no longer present on all distributions.

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upvoteby egorfine4 hours ago|
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> Just dynamically link against the oldest glibc you want to support

I wish it would that simple for practical use cases.

I ship professional software for colorists for Hollywood studios and they absolutely love to never upgrade. We have to ship for RockyLinux 8. Sad.

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upvoteby eoanermine3 hours ago|
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RockyLinux doesn't sound so bad. It's not even EOL.
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upvoteby egorfine2 hours ago|
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It's just this short of being EOL.
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upvoteby duskdozer2 hours ago|
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Almost three years?

>Rocky Linux 8 is supported by the Rocky Linux project until May 2029.

https://forums.rockylinux.org/t/what-is-eol-of-rl8/3316/3

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upvoteby egorfine1 hours ago|
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Yes but only the very last version and only paid support. Don't mind to pay, it's just that no amount of payment would be a proper solution to ancient environment with everything.
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upvoteby yxhuvud4 hours ago|
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This is not a desirable solution on musl based systems. Whatever you do in that situation ends up horrible, so it is about finding the least bad solution. Which this seems like a workable variant of.
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upvoteby throwaway20463 hours ago|
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> Just dynamically link against the oldest glibc you want to support.

Just the other day I tried running an older binary and it failed with a glibc error, despite it being linked to a glibc version that's barely 5 releases behind the one on my system. So maybe glibc isn't backwards compatible after all...

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upvoteby account423 hours ago|
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Or maybe you misunderstood the error message.
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upvoteby pg832 hours ago|
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Or may be not.
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upvoteby pg834 hours ago|
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This means the user will update the binary with my program and continue using it happily.

I'm not offering a silver bullet, but the approach I've implemented is much better than what the industry currently offers.

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