Re: Adapting binaries easily to musl, or database with binaries (musl)

[Rich Felker <dalias@libc.org>]

On Fri, Jun 07, 2019 at 01:53:50PM +0000, Brian Peregrine wrote:
> I'm looking for an easy way on how people can either:
> * adapt their downloaded binaries to be able to run on musl
> * or simply download prepared musl binaries from a database
> 
> I doubt that second option exists, as such a database would need to
> cover a large amounts of programs, for various cpu classes, and be
> often updated with new versions of those programs.

The best way is to use binaries packaged by your distribution rather
than by the software authors. This is true whether you're using a
musl-based or glibc-based distribution. There's usually a better chain
of trust/responsibility, and you know they're built to work with the
library ecosystem you'll have rather than one that's just
"sufficiently similar" (often not).

With that said, there's also an *intent* that projects that want to
ship binaries should be able to ship *static-linked* musl binaries
that run on any system, glibc or musl or something else, possibly not
even Linux, as long as it supports the Linux syscall ABI. However,
this is currently difficult for graphics applications due to the
current OpenGL architecture of dlopen'ing a userspace driver (linked
against a particular libc/library ecosystem) into your program.
Solving this problem is a major long-term goal.

> I'm particularly looking for the most recent (stable, musl) version of
> chromium browser and/or firefox, I'm running gentoo linux (musl), on a
> 32-bit (i686) machine.

Did you roll your own "distro" from scratch, or are you using one of
the musl-based distros?

> For firefox, glibc binaries are available from
> https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/linux/
> For chromium I couldn't really find a glibc binary;
> there's https://www.chromium.org/getting-involved/download-chromium
> but that redirects to an unstable version
> (https://download-chromium.appspot.com ) and to
> http://commondatastorage.googleapis.com/chromium-browser-snapshots/index.html
> (but those are old binaries).
> 
> Anyway, can someone describe how the binaries can be easily altered to
> run on a musl distro , and tell me a download link for chromium for
> the latest stable release ?
> With the binaries, I want to avoid to need to compile the gentoo
> package (this can be problematic as live distro's are not updated that
> often).

Isn't building from source kinda the point of Gentoo? I can understand
not wanting to do that for everything, but that's the reason I prefer
other distros. If Bedrock Linux is still around, it might make it easy
to use packages from other musl-based distros like Alpine, Void, or
Adelie, but I think they'd use their own library ecosystems rather
than the main host one, which would be less efficient and kinda defeat
the purpose. I may be wrong about that, though. There should also be
ways to manually extract/integrate their packages into your Gentoo
host.

Rich