Sometimes it makes sense to ship a program to linux users in ready-to-run form that will work no matter what distribution they are using. This is hard.

Often a commerical linux game will bundle up a few of the more problimatic libraries, and ship a dynamic executable that still depends on other system libaries. These days they're building and shipping entire Debian derivatives instead, to avoid needing to deal with that.

There have been a few efforts to provide so-called one click install package systems that AFAIK, have not been widely used. I don't know if they generally solved the problem.

More modern appoaches seem to be things like docker, which move the application bundle into a containerized environment. I have not looked at these, but so far it does not seem to have spread widely enough to be a practical choice if you're wanting to provide something that will work for a majority of linux users.

So, I'm surprised that I seem to have managed to solve this problem using nothing more than some ugly shell scripts.

My standalone tarballs of git-annex now seem fairly good at running on a very wide variety of systems.

For example, I unpacked the tarball into the Debian-Installer initramfs and git-annex could run there. I can delete all of /usr and it keeps working! All it needs is a basic sh, which even busybox provides.

Looks likely that the new armel standalone tarball of git-annex will soon be working on embedded systems as odd as the Synology NAS, and it's already been verified to work on Raspbian. (I'm curious if it would work on Android, but that might be a stretch.)

[Update: It does work on Android, indeed this is how git-annex is ported to Android now. Saved an amazing amount of bother with cross-compilation.]

Currently these tarballs are built for a specific architecture, but there's no particular reason a single one couldn't combine binaries built for each supported architecture.

technical details

The main trick is to ship a copy of ld-linux.so, as well as all the glibc libraries and associated files, and of course every other library and file the application needs.

Shipping ld-linux.so lets a shell script wrapper be made around each binary, that runs ld-linux.so and passes it the library directories to search. This way the binary can be run, bypassing the system's own dynamic linker (which might not like it) and using the included glibc.

For example a shell script that runs the git binary from the bundle:

exec "$GIT_ANNEX_LINKER" --library-path "$GIT_ANNEX_LD_LIBRARY_PATH" "$GIT_ANNEX_SHIMMED/git/git" "$@"

I have to set quite a lot of environment variables, to avoid using any files from the system and instead use ones from my tarball. One important one is GCONV_PATH. Note that LD_LIBRARY_PATH does not have to be set, and this is nice because it allows running a few programs from the host system, such as its web browser.

worse is better

Of course I'll take a proper distribution package anytime over this.

Still, it seems to work quite well, in all the horrible cases that require it.

(Posted as a comment to Charles Stross's blog post about bitcoin)

Bitcoin is a piece of software which tries to implement a particular SFnal future. One in which the world currency is de-centralized, deflationary, all early bitcoin adopters own their own planetoids, and all visitors are automatically charged for the air they breath.

Thing is, the real world is more complicated than that. Assuming Bitcoin did manage to become an important currency, countries would naturally try to regulate it. In 30 years, by the time bitcoin mining has slowed right down, the legal system will be fully caught up to the internet.

Bitcoin tries to make its code the law (as Lessig used to say), but the law can certainly affect its code.

The law could, for example, require that bitcoin be changed to stop increasing the difficulty of mining new blocks. Then bitcoin is suddenly an inflationary currency. This would be a hard fork in the block chain, but one enforced by financial regulators. Miners would be tracked down and forced to comply. Some would perhaps go underground and run the deflationary bitcoin network on TOR hidden services. Lots of possible ways it could play out.

That's only one scenario, covering one of the many problems with Bitcoin that make Charlie hate it. So it seems to me that Bitcoin should be a gold mine for Science Fiction authors, if nothing else..