Varieties of 'nux?

[jeykey]

Love the Evo ppa!

+1

[hollunder]

The only real way to go is to let packagers handle the packaging. Don't try to package yourself. There are far too many distros out there. If you want it to be packaged for distro XYZ, then contact a packager/maintainer. Static linking is frowned upon for a number of reasons, some people do it anyway and still have problems. Take osmos as example, it's much smaller/simpler, apparently extensively tested (http://www.hemispheregames.com/faq/#linux_distros) and yet they had a number of issues (http://www.hemispheregames.com/forum/vi ... ?f=8&t=378). And those are not all, the osmos demo managed to completely lock up my machine, something that basically never happened in all the years that I run Linux.
So let distros do the packaging, let distros take care of the distro specific problems.

[Pithikos]

You can in fact compile Spring with the libraries so that it will work on ANY distro and not depend on external libraries. However that makes bigger files and none does that. In Linux the compiled programs are linked to external libraries in your system and thus if some library is missing, the program won't compile/run until you install that library. However you can make a copy of the libraries inside the binary itself so not external linking is used. That's essentially what .exe files in windows are and I find it a much better design than the Linux design as there are NO dependencies nonsense. With some terabytes of space on computers nowadays I don't get why this is not the default way of compiling.
That's also how some commercial binaries come in a single .bin file and run smoothly on any distro. They can be installers(Google Earth) or the program itself(Firefox).

[koshi]

You can in fact compile Spring with the libraries so that it will work on ANY distro and not depend on external libraries

I'd like to see you demonstrate proof of that claim. I could really use it.

That's essentially what .exe files in windows are

Nope.

I don't get why this is not the default way of compiling

I guess users don't like to depend on thousands of people rebuilding and repacking their software every time a (potentially system-compromising) bug has been fixed in any of the potentially dozens of libraries that software was statically linked against.

[wolas]

There is such program which can create backup or something from existing installation and that backup runs on any linux distro, I read and tryed (poor amarok 1.4) it year or two ago cant remember name though... So one way or another it is really possible to make universal package for all linux, it just depends on how much libraries you must add and how big percentage of linux will be covered.

[dansan]

That's also how some commercial binaries come in a single .bin file and run smoothly on any distro. They can be installers(Google Earth) or the program itself(Firefox).

There are lots of issues with those programs. They are generally slow to pick up API changes and thus break often. Often there is only a version for 32 bit and then Linux users and distros must double installed libraries (flash, games), or they were compiled against a specific version of an external library (and wrapper-hacks follow), they don't integrate properly into DE, because they ship with their own TK (eg FF and GTK2 file-opener) etc. Lots of problems... ask distro maintainers, it's a mess.

terabytes of space on computers

On harddisks, but not in memory!, and statically linked libs do not share mem, but are loaded with each app again, thus being slower and using much more memory.