Re: Building EPICS for multiple Linux distributions

[Robert Soliday <soliday@aps.anl.gov>]

Andrew Johnson wrote:
> Hi John,
>
> On Wednesday 10 March 2010 08:45:01 John Dobbins wrote:
> > I was wondering if anyone can suggest an approach for building EPICS on
> > multiple linux distributions (which may have different kernel versions,
> > compiler versions, etc.)
> >
> > Does one define new architectures linux-x86-distribution_a
> > linux-x86-distribution_b?
>
> If you find that you do actually need to build different binaries on different 
> distributions then that is probably the best way to do it, although you should 
> not need to do that for every distribution.  We have not had to introduce 
> anything like that here at the APS, although our Linux distributions are all 
> either Fedora Core or Red-Had Enterprise based.  These have so far proven to 
> be completely forward compatible, provided we install the distribution's 
> relevant compatibility packages to provide the older .so libraries.  We 
> usually build shared code on the oldest distribution that we need to support, 
> and find that it then just works on all our machines running newer versions.
>
> Note that a different kernel version should almost never require a change to 
> user-level application code, although some system utilities do need to match 
> particular kernel releases.  The Linux distributors seem to have solved most 
> compatibility problems, and in my experience if I have a problem running 
> binaries on a different machine it usually means it's missing an RPM.
>
> HTH,
>
> - Andrew

In the recent past when there were a lot of different flavors of Linux 
floating around here, this was a problem that I had to overcome. What I 
did was to build EPICS/Base with only static libraries and then build 
our EPICS/Extensions so that they are not linked to any shared 
libraries. To do this I editing epics/extensions/configure/CONFIG with 
the following:

echo SHARED_LIBRARIES=NO >> CONFIG
echo STATIC_BUILD=YES >> CONFIG
echo STATIC_LDLIBS_YES= -lc >> CONFIG
echo STATIC_LDFLAGS_YES= -Wl,-Bstatic -static-libgcc >> CONFIG
echo LDLIBS_READLINE = -lreadline -lcurses >> CONFIG

There is probably a better place to put these file but for my use this 
was good enough. The end result was completely static binaries that 
could run on any Linux system.

--Bob