alt Hacker NewsAs long as the library is available.
Neither static nor dynamic linking is looking to solve the 20 year old binaries issue, so both will have different issues.
But I think it's easier for me to find a 20 year old ISO of a Red Hat/Slackware where I can simply run the statically linked binary. Dependency hell for older distros become really difficult when the older packages are not archived anywhere anymore.
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It's interesting to think how a 20 year old OS plus one program is probably a smaller bundle size than many modern Electron apps ostensibly built "for cross platform compatibility". Maybe microkernels are the way.
Debian archives all of our binaries (and source) here:
Some things built on top of that:
https://manpages.debian.org/man/debsnap https://manpages.debian.org/man/debbisect https://wiki.debian.org/BisectDebian https://metasnap.debian.net/ https://reproduce.debian.net/
I've recently had to do this (to bisect when a change introduced a superficial bug into a 20-year-old program). I think "simply run" is viewing Linux of that era through rose-tinted glasses.
Even for simple 2D "Super VGA" you're needing to choose the correct XFree86 implementation and still tweak your Xorg configuration. The emulated hardware also has bugs, since most of the focus is now on virtio drivers.
(The 20-year-old program was linked against libsdl, which amusingly means on my modern system it supports Wayland with no issues.)