It’s been a long day and I’m probably not in the best state of mind to be asking this question, but have you guys solved packaging yet?
I want to ship an executable with supporting files in a compressed archive, much like the Windows exe-in-a-zip pattern. I can cross-compile a Win32 C program using MinGW that will always use baseline Win32 functionality, but if I try to build for Linux I run into the whole dependency versioning situation, specifically glibc fixing its symbol version to whichever Linux I happen to be building from at the time. But if I try to static link with musl, the expectation is that everything is static linked, including system libraries that really shouldn’t be.
AppImage is in the ballpark of what I’m looking for, and I’ve heard that Zig works as a compatibility-enhancing frontend if you’re compiling C. I’d just like something simple that runs 99% of the time for non-technical end users and isn’t bloated with dependencies I can’t keep track of. (No containers.) Is this easily achievable?
How can you guarantee that depencies are compatible across versions? That’s a fundamental point I think you are missing.
I don’t use dependencies that don’t have a history of backwards compatibility, and when I do, I ship them. It’s SOP to assume basic things like a GUI “just work”, and it’s also SOP for Ubuntu to ship non-functional programs that were broken by GTK and Qt updates. I’d rather have buggy/broken software with undefined behavior than software that just doesn’t run.