[Development] Linux release binaries too old

[Alejandro Exojo]

El Monday 25 August 2014, Blasche Alexander escribió:
> Hi,
> 
> It is my understanding that the current Linux release binary packages are
> built on Ubuntu 11.10 machines. This is very ancient. In fact for
> Bluetooth Low Energy (new feature in 5.4) this is too ancient.
 
The reason to use an old distro was to support a broad set. If you use a newer 
one, the symbol versioning of libc gets in the way, and the binaries no longer 
work on other distros.

> What's needed is a machine that has Bluez 4.101 or newer. This means even
> the fairly old 12.04 is too old unless we retrofit those newer headers. If
> we don't want to retrofit and assuming we want to stay with Ubuntu we'd
> require 14.04.

How feasable is to backport a newer BlueZ to that old distro, on the machines 
that build the binaries? I managed to do a quick and dirty BlueZ 5 backport to 
Debian stable quite easily (where "easy" means I got the backported kernel 
already on the distro, so that's done). I can give it a try if needed, since 
BlueZ 4 should be easier. I don't remember any kernel requirements.

> Bluetooth requires the newer headers only at build time. I tested binaries
> on 12.04 by faking the new symbols and it still seemed to work.
> 
> The question is how many old distros do we leave behind? Bluez 4.101 was
> released in June 2012. If distros update Qt they are likely to recompile
> anyway.

Release dates are a bit misleading here. ;-)

Compare the popularity of Qt4 vs Qt5 applications on distributions. With BlueZ 
is worse, since is a complete rewrite of the API. Even the most recent Ubuntu 
is still on BlueZ 4.

-- 
Alex (a.k.a. suy) | GPG ID 0x0B8B0BC2
http://barnacity.net/ | http://disperso.net