> Question: Does someone know a way to compile a binary that is not tied
> to a specific GLIBC version? Squeak does not actually use anything
> fancy from these newer versions, it's just the linker who thinks we
> would. That would allow us to create binaries that work across a wider
> range of machines.
>

Bert,

Binaries are not tied to particular GLIBC versions, upward compatibility
is usually conserved) ; but our "friends"
at Cygnus (now RedHat) decided that libffi should get moved from a
separate library into gcc as part of changes for the sake of C++ ABI
stuff going on (as far as I can gather).

The net result is that a very few binaries don't run across the
transition to the new gcc 3/glibc versions, and that
Squeak breaks (along with a handful of other apps).  I've had few other
problems moving to the new compiler/library.

So basically, what needs to happen is a new binary needs to get built;
hopefully this won't happen again.

If the source RPM had been made available, doing this might have been
as easy as doing a "rpmbuild --rebuild", but I never saw one lying around.
Generally, it is a good idea to post the source RPM as well as the binary;
that lets people rebuild for other architectures Linux runs on easily,
and/or optimize for Athlon/686 if they care about speed.
                                  - Jim

--
Jim Gettys
Cambridge Research Laboratory
HP Labs, Hewlett-Packard Company
Jim.Gettys at hp.com