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

[Szabolcs Nagy <nsz@port70.net>]

* Brian Peregrine <peregrinebrian@gmail.com> [2019-06-08 09:33:32 +0000]:
> I looked at https://distfiles.adelielinux.org/adelie/1.0-beta3/user/pmmx/
> but those are apk packages. I actually want something that avoids
> users needing to compile non-standard programs themselves and have
> these technical (compiling) skills to begin with.

you can bundle the apks into a self extracting script.

> 
> I'm not familiar with apk packages; can these simply be unzipped (ie
> with xarchiver) and can the unzipped files then run directly in gentoo
> (same as with a binary) ? If so, then it would be suitable
> (installation with APK Tools wouldn't be suitable as we have ). I

$ file foo.apk
foo.apk: gzip compressed data
$ gunzip <foo.apk |file -
/dev/stdin: POSIX tar archive

it's a tar.gz with the files to install and some metadata.

a packaging tool can manage dependencies, so you can
install/uninstall/update components easily, if you do
it with a third party script, it will be unclear what
deps come from the system and what deps from the script
and how to manage security updates for the latter.
and if the abi of a system component changes after an
update then the third party app may stop working.

extracting is likely not enough, you want to put the
binaries under a separate directory and set up paths
for that so lib/exe/etc is found by the app.

> don't care too much with these on whether it's for i586 and not i686
> as long as it runs and people can download the file quickly and run
> without too much fuss (the extraction step doesn't add that much time
> compared to compiling it, ...), mainly as it's just a 2nd browser that
> would not be used often, except in special cases.
> 
> For TAZ, VCT Labs compiles the standard gentoo packages and makes sure
> it runs under musl, in TAZ. So technically, there's not reason why we
> can't do this for firefox, and simply include that program (firefox)
> in our distro. Why haven't we done, you might ask. Reason is that we
> already have a browser (Palemoon) and this has been made to run under
> musl. However, for only certain websites (github for instance) it
> doesn't work, even when using (recent firefox or chrome user agent
> strings). I don't want to add another browser in our distro since that
> would be (most of the time) redundant and I want TAZ users to use
> Palemoon (as that focuses on security and simplicity more).
> 
> We also have git-scm but that doesn't allow to do all functions github
> has (for instance, changing the profile photo, modifying git issues,
> ...) and I think that it's also annoying to need to use git-scm when
> you need to change just a few lines on your repo (which in the
> browser, would take far less time to do then with git-scm).