Distributing Zsh with application in Git repositor

Distributing Zsh with application in Git repositor

[Ronald Fischer]

Problem: I have a Git repository containing an application. Part of the
application is a set of Zsh-Scripts. The requirement is that the
application should be executed on some Gnu/Linux system (where I have no
access to), by downloading/updating the Repository and execute a certain
start script.

The problem is here that I have no guarantee that the target system will
have zsh installed (at least not in the version I need). Hence my idea
is to make zsh part of the Gnu repository.

One obvious solution is to download the tar file, and have my start
script compile and install Zsh locally (no admin rights), but I wonder
if there is an easier way. Is it possible to create (or download) a
standalone executable of zsh?

Ronald

Re: Distributing Zsh with application in Git repositor

[Bart Schaefer]

On Jun 27,  3:32pm, Ronald Fischer wrote:
}
} Is it possible to create (or download) a standalone executable of zsh?

You can "configure --disable-dynamic" combined with passing the static
linking options for the compiler via LDFLAGS (the default is to link
e.g. glibc et al. dynamically even when linking modules statically).

You'll want to prepare a modified config.modules file to be sure that
any modules you need are linked to the shell (link=static load=yes),
and that any you do NOT want are NOT linked (link=no) to keep the
size of the binary to a minimum.  You must edit config.modules AFTER
running configure, so perhaps keep the edited copy around under another
name so you can just cp it on top of config.modules before "make".

And you'll need to compile at least one binary for every hardware
architecture, if not for every target OS variant, and make sure your
application installer grabs the correct one.