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

On 2018-08-21, Grant Edwards wrote:

> 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?

This is something I would like to do as well (grabbing all the required
libraries for a given binary). Unfortunately, so far I didn't have
enough time to look into it. But here's a link from my bookmarks, which
might (or not...) be useful to you:

    http://www.ucc.asn.au/~dagobah/~dagobah/things/make-static.html

-- 
Nuno Silva