Re: Cannot run opera 12.10 on CentOS 5.8

[email protected] (Freddy Jensen) writes:

> Thank you very much Erik for your feedback. It was very helpful.
>
> Now, in general,... would it be possible for Opera to release an
> update to Opera where this problem is fixed, for example by
> bundling the required functions so that we don't run into that
> problem?

In principle, yes.  There are several ways to do this.  I think the
obvious solution would be reimplementing qsort_r ourselves.

> I think it is a good idea to bundle those kinds of dependencies
> as much as possible to make Opera run "everywhere".
>
> CentOS is a very popular Linux distribution here in the US so I
> think it would be a good idea to make sure that Opera runs on
> all Linux distributions.

It is always a question which releases of which distributions we should
support.  CentOS is not currently on the list of distributions we make
an extra effort to support.  We'll fix issues that are easily dealt
with, but we generally won't do much more.

I do find it annoying that such a "minor" issue causes us to lose
compatibility with CentOS 5, but the effort to fix it is likely too big
that we can justify doing it.

I can't tell you the details of why CentOS isn't on our prioritized
list, since I don't follow those decisions very closely.  Obviously,
popularity is an important factor, but I think there is a perception
that CentOS is primarily a "server" system.  And as such, it is less of
a target platform for a "desktop" application like a web browser.

> A few years ago I had the exact same problem with firefox and
> Redhat Enterprise 5.5 and it was very difficult to find a
> solution to it.
>
> In the past I worked on a Linux server product that had to run on
> as many linux distributions as possible, and I found out that by
> bundling these libraries with the distribution we pretty much
> were able to run *everywhere*:
>
> --> libgcc_s.so.1
> --> libstdc++.so.6
>
> They were bundled in such a way that our program (Unix Distiller Server)
> would bind to the bundled libraries instead of to the ones installed on
> the OS. Of course, I realize that bundling libc is not an option because
> libc is more intimately tied to the underlying OS
>
> Would it be possible to do the same for Opera?
>
> Thanks

It would be possible, but I doubt we will choose to spend the necessary
effort.

eirik
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