Linux - excluding libs

[David Cortesi]

I have a case where if I built on Ubuntu 10, the resulting bundle would segfault on Ubuntu 13. I was making separate builds for each, but then I read the excellent suggestion by Nathan Weston <elb...@spamcop.net>:

> One thing I've found is that, on Linux, PyInstaller will pull in a bunch
> of system libraries, and you're often better off skipping these and
> using whatever version is installed on the target machine....
> The libraries we're excluding right now are: libfontconfig.so,
> libglib-2.0.so, libX11.so, libXext.so, libXau.so... [etc]

I took the Ubuntu-10 build to Ubuntu-13 (gotta love Dropbox plus Parallels!)

and dragged out of it all the lib*.so* files that I could 'find' in /usr/lib.

Et voila, the app now works, no segfault.

So I began putting them back one at a time and found that it was only

libX11.so.6 whose presence caused a segfault.

I changed my spec file to read, in part:
a = Analysis(...)
nox11 = a.binaries - [('libX11.so.6',None,None)]
...
coll = COLLECT(exe,
               nox11,
               a.zipfiles,
               a.datas, ...

Replacing the "a.binaries" with the modified "nox11" tree. And this works: the app builds sans libX11 and runs on both Ubuntu 10 and 13.