<html>
<head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8">
</head>
<body>
<p>Hi,<br>
</p>
<div class="moz-cite-prefix">On 2020-10-06 12:34, Francis Herne
wrote:<br>
</div>
<blockquote type="cite" cite="mid:9261203.HQhmNZf6hW@cleator">
<pre class="moz-quote-pre" wrap="">Someone pointed me at <a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://appimage-builder.readthedocs.io/en/latest/" moz-do-not-send="true">https://appimage-builder.readthedocs.io/en/latest/</a>
index.html , which removes the need for building on ancient distro releases
altogether</pre>
</blockquote>
<p>I doubt that. There is a very real effect of building on the old
distro: you build against an old glibc binary interface, which
depends on an old kernel binary interface. glibc is guaranteed
backwards compatible, but not forward compatible.<br>
</p>
<ul>
<li>You obviously cannot ship the kernel with the AppImage.</li>
<li>For this reason, you cannot ship glibc either, because a new
glibc might use interfaces of the kernel that don't exist yet on
the user's older machine.</li>
<li>Thus, all your userspace libraries must not use any of the new
glibc functionality. The only way to guarantee that I know of is
to build against the old interface.</li>
</ul>
<p>This problem isn't going away without a lot of effort from a lot
of parties, I think. It isn't solvable by just shipping the right
set of libraries, you actually need builds of the libraries that
fulfill this condition.<br>
</p>
<p>Greetings!<br>
</p>
<p><br>
</p>
</body>
</html>