Upgrade build machines?

[John Clements]

The machines we use to build our Linux distributions are currently running 8.11, which is no longer supported by Debian. We could pay Freexian for Extended LTS support, or upgrade (or do nothing, of course :)). My understanding is that we generally use the oldest supported version of debian in order to make it more likely that our binaries will run on older machines. However, I freely admit that I’m not an expert in this area.

But some of you are!

So here’s my question: if we upgrade to debian 9 or even (gasp) 10, would the resulting binaries run on earlier versions of Linux?

Pointers gratefully appreciated.

Many thanks,

John

[Paul A. Steckler]

On Sun, Jun 27, 2021 at 10:16 AM 'John Clements' via Racket Developers
<racke...@googlegroups.com> wrote:
> So here’s my question: if we upgrade to debian 9 or even (gasp) 10, would the resulting binaries run on earlier versions of Linux?

Do the binaries use dynamic libraries? Those libraries differ among
Debian versions.

Other than that, I'd suppose the Debian version is immaterial.

(I'm working on a project that is sensitive to the Debian version,
because of such library issues.)

-- Paul

[George Neuner]

Most problems come from build chain (compiler) libraries: e.g., libc,
glib, etc.  OS libraries also occasionally cause problems, but it's much
less likely than with build libraries.

George

[Matthew Flatt]

At Sun, 27 Jun 2021 11:55:29 -0700, "Paul A. Steckler" wrote:
> On Sun, Jun 27, 2021 at 10:16 AM 'John Clements' via Racket Developers
> <racke...@googlegroups.com> wrote:
> > So here’s my question: if we upgrade to debian 9 or even (gasp) 10, would the
> resulting binaries run on earlier versions of Linux?
>
> Do the binaries use dynamic libraries? Those libraries differ among
> Debian versions.

The C library (glibc) is dynamically linked, and that's usually the
issue. While the shared library is generally called "libc.so.6", the
compiler or linker apparent generates a run-time check (based on which
functions Racket uses from the C library?) to ensure that the library
is actually new enough.

I tried building Racket on Debian 10, and the result ran on Debian 8,
so probably upgrading to 10 is fine.

[John Clements]

Great! Many thanks.

John

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