Ubuntu To Eventually Have Its Own SDK

[ShadowBane]

You got it completely wrong, you can ship current libs but the libc6 used must be old enough to allow other distros run the code, that's the main dependency of a system. Some HIB games come out and only ran with Ubuntu and not Debian, that's definitely wrong. Partly only the installer was compiled against that new code - manually extracting helped but that's not user friendly. The Linux world does not only consists of Ubuntu only - they just intend to ship always a very new libc6...

There is no reason that game developers should have to stick to ancient toolchains to accommodate the few who want to use distros who have a strange hatred for halfway recent packages. Also, if they shipped the used glibc with the package it would work on litteraly /any/ linux system. Third party developers really need to ship their libraries on linux like they do on windows.

[JanC]

You got it completely wrong, you can ship current libs but the libc6 used must be old enough to allow other distros run the code, that's the main dependency of a system. Some HIB games come out and only ran with Ubuntu and not Debian, that's definitely wrong. Partly only the installer was compiled against that new code - manually extracting helped but that's not user friendly. The Linux world does not only consists of Ubuntu only - they just intend to ship always a very new libc6...

Ubuntu 10.04 is still supported too; and I would be surprised if those games would work with it but not with Debian stable...

So it's in the best interest of those game developers to make sure older versions work too (especially now that Ubuntu desktop versions get 5 years of support).

[Kano]

@ShadowBane

It is correct that you could extract the libc6 package and put it in a dir which you specify using LD_LIBRARY_PATH but thats not really user friendly. Usually nobody ships libc6 with a game.

@JanC

That's just a dark theory that this would work. Two examples:

a) Warsow - the binary in the tar.gz would work on U 10.04 but does not because it is compiled against a custom installed libpng15 which is not available in Debian/Ubuntu. Precompiled binaries for U 12.04 is available to be used on top.

b) Reaction

This is compiled against a libc6 from U 12.04. It starts using an extracted libc6 i386 - very user friendly.

Basically it is not that problematic for those examples as you can get the source and compile it on your own. But it shows that Linux binaries are often problematic for ppl with older Ubuntu installs or other distros like Debian. It's mainly the missing out-the-box experience that you usually get with Win.

[ShadowBane]

@ShadowBane

It is correct that you could extract the libc6 package and put it in a dir which you specify using LD_LIBRARY_PATH but thats not really user friendly. Usually nobody ships libc6 with a game.

A lot of games and stuff provide a launcher script that can do things like specify the library paths before loading the game. It is literally no extra work for the end user.