Re: Generic binaries depending on libcurl3

On Mon, 9 Dec 2019 at 12:06, Thomas Leonard <[email protected]> wrote:
>
> On Sat, 23 Nov 2019 at 14:03, Thomas Leonard <[email protected]> wrote:
> >
> > On Sun, 17 Nov 2019 at 18:37, Bastian Eicher <[email protected]> wrote:
> > >
> > > The generic Linux binaries for 0install
> > > (https://0install.net/injector.html#linux-generic) depend on libcurl3.
> > > However, this library is no longer available in Debian starting with Buster
> > > or Ubuntu starting with 18.10.
> > >
> > > Installing the suggested replacement library libcurl4 results in:
> > > 0install: /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libcurl.so.4: version `CURL_OPENSSL_3'
> > > not found (required by 0install)
> > >
> > > Maybe we should look back into possibilities for statically linking
> > > 0install's dependencies?
> >
> > This Dockerfile seems to work now (using the latest Alpine edge,
> > building from a 0install Git clone):
> [...]
>
> I tried a few more things with this. The situation is:
>
> - If we statically link everything on Alpine then we can't use GTK,
> because the statically-linked libmusl doesn't support dynamic linking.
> - If we dynamically link libmusl then we get a dependency on libmusl
> and it doesn't work anywhere except Alpine.
> - If we build on Debian then we only get a dependency on glibc, but it
> has lots of symbols that aren't on Alpine, etc.
>
> I also tried using cohttp/ocaml-tls as an alternative to libcurl
> (https://github.com/0install/0install/pull/122). That avoids the above
> problems, but it seems that ocaml-tls doesn't work with all web-sites.
> For example, the set of ciphers supported by GitLab doesn't seem to
> intersect with the set supported by ocaml-tls, so you just get a
> handshake failure.
>
> We could use cohttp with openssl, but I seem to recall that openssl is
> no better at binary compatibility than libcurl.

I've now merged support for using cohttp with openssl
(https://github.com/0install/0install/pull/122). This means you can
static link openssl to get a fairly portable binary. To try it out:

git clone https://github.com/0install/0install.git
cd 0install
make static/dist.tgz

You'll need to have Docker installed to build this way. You can also
run `make static-test` to test the archive on Debian 10 and Fedora 30
(also using Docker).

It would be good to test the resulting binary on more sites. In
particular, cohttp doesn't support FTP, so I hacked up a client myself
quickly. It works on ftp.vim.org, but that's the only one I tested. If
you're still using FTP, I'd recommend testing your site yourself.

If no-one reports any problems, I'll make a new release in a couple of days.


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