Gentoo Archives: gentoo-user

From: james <garftd@×××××××.net>
To: gentoo-user@l.g.o
Subject: Re: [gentoo-user] Running 3rd party apps intended for Ubuntu/RedHat
Date: Tue, 21 Aug 2018 22:55:19
Message-Id: 4a648d32-d27c-4e94-3f70-2fa27c2f5432@verizon.net
In Reply to: [gentoo-user] Running 3rd party apps intended for Ubuntu/RedHat by Grant Edwards
1 On 8/21/18 6:25 PM, Grant Edwards wrote:
2 > There are a handful of 3rd party, closed-source apps that I run on my
3 > Gentoo systems. Often they're available for RedHat or Ubuntu,
4 > sometimes for "generic" Linux.
5 >
6 > The apps for "generic" Linux usually run without too much trouble,
7 > since they tend to include most of the libraries they need bundled
8 > with the package or linked statically with the executable.
9 >
10 > Apps packaged for RedHat or Ubuntu tend to rely on the host for far
11 > more libraries (e.g. Qt or Gtk and underlying X11 stuff). Sometimes I
12 > have to copy some libraries from a RedHat or Ubuntu system and set
13 > LD_LIBRARY_PATH to point to that set of "private" libraries to get
14 > these apps running. Manually figuring out which libraries are
15 > required is a time-consuming and error-prone process. One of the ones
16 > I use regularly is going to stop working one of these days because it
17 > depends on qtwebkit-4.8, which has been EOL'ed on Gentoo. [So I'll
18 > have to grab one more library from an Ubuntu system.]
19 >
20 > I've been thinking about trying to automate this by installing the app
21 > on an Ubuntu or RedHat system and then running a bash script that uses
22 > ldd et alia to find and bundle up the set of required library files.
23 > (How deep to recurse in the tree of library dependencies will be a big
24 > question.)
25 >
26 > If I understand what containers are (never used them), it occurs to me
27 > that if I bundle up everything all the way down to libc and libgcc, I
28 > might as well be using a container, right?
29 >
30 > Is this a good use case for containers, or is there some other way to
31 > do this?
32 >
33
34 An alternative might be to use flatpak where applicable?
35
36
37 https://flatpak.org/setup/Gentoo/
38
39
40 I too am interested in a direct answer to your question. Surely options
41 for gentoo, for things not in the portage tree or overlays, needs to be
42 be robustly developed, imho.
43
44 hth,
45 James

Replies

Subject Author
[gentoo-user] Re: Running 3rd party apps intended for Ubuntu/RedHat Grant Edwards <grant.b.edwards@×××××.com>