[erlang-questions] Creating an application that is portable across versions of CentOS

[Florian Waas]

Just confirming what others already mentioned: in fact, natively built
binaries (including the Erlang VM) aren't portable between CentOS 5.x and
6.x. Within each generation things are usually portable though, e.g., from
5.8 to 5.10 etc.

We have a few customers who still run 5.x -- and, yes, we roll a separate
5.x release for them.

Regards,
-fl.



On Sat, Dec 20, 2014 at 1:58 AM, zxq9 <zxq9@REDACTED> wrote:

> On 2014年12月20日 土曜日 11:11:34 Loïc Hoguin wrote:
> > The beam files are portable. The VM itself is not. As a first guess I
> > would look to see if there are libc incompatibilities between the CentOS
> > versions which would make loading the executables fail. Another possible
> > issue is crypto, if you didn't compile it statically.
> >
> > If that fails I would use file or ld or other on the erl or erlexec
> > executable to figure out what the problem is. Running erl directly might
> > also give a better error message.
>
> Indeed, there are a lot of differences between the 5.x and 6.x systems with
> regard to libs. It is unreasonable to expect a binary built against one
> RHEL
> major version family to work directly on another. Rebuilds are nearly
> always
> necessary. There are major version differences between some core libraries
> and
> the kernels don't look much alike at all anymore, either (RedHat backports
> a
> lot of security fixes, but they don't slide versions forward in the core
> distro, only in "developer tools" add ons).
>
> It looks like Erlang Solutions is only maintaining rpms for the Fedora
> 12/13
> derived family (RHEL 6 & friends) and Fedora 19 family (RHEL 7 &co.). 5.x
> was
> based on Fedora Core 6 -- which in Linux history terms was the Bronze Age.
>
> All that said, building from source on 5.2 should be pretty
> straightforward if
> it has been receiving updates (in particular to gcc -- I'm not sure what
> version 5.2 had to start with, but needed bug fixes should have been
> released
> in maintenance patches). Building with wxErlang might be a challenge,
> though.
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