[gentoo-user] Running 3rd party apps intended for Ubuntu/RedHat

[Grant Edwards]

There are a handful of 3rd party, closed-source apps that I run on my
Gentoo systems.  Often they're available for RedHat or Ubuntu,
sometimes for "generic" Linux.

The apps for "generic" Linux usually run without too much trouble,
since they tend to include most of the libraries they need bundled
with the package or linked statically with the executable.

Apps packaged for RedHat or Ubuntu tend to rely on the host for far
more libraries (e.g. Qt or Gtk and underlying X11 stuff).  Sometimes I
have to copy some libraries from a RedHat or Ubuntu system and set
LD_LIBRARY_PATH to point to that set of "private" libraries to get
these apps running.  Manually figuring out which libraries are
required is a time-consuming and error-prone process.  One of the ones
I use regularly is going to stop working one of these days because it
depends on qtwebkit-4.8, which has been EOL'ed on Gentoo.  [So I'll
have to grab one more library from an Ubuntu system.]

I've been thinking about trying to automate this by installing the app
on an Ubuntu or RedHat system and then running a bash script that uses
ldd et alia to find and bundle up the set of required library files.
(How deep to recurse in the tree of library dependencies will be a big
question.)

If I understand what containers are (never used them), it occurs to me
that if I bundle up everything all the way down to libc and libgcc, I
might as well be using a container, right?

Is this a good use case for containers, or is there some other way to
do this?

-- 
Grant Edwards               grant.b.edwards        Yow! Yes, but will I
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