[m-users.] Product deployment on multiple platforms.

[Peter Wang]

On Tue, 05 Jul 2022 09:31:52 +0100 "Sean Charles (emacstheviking)" <objitsu at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I am close to completing a simple tool that I want to sell / donate-ware across multiple platforms using Mercury.
> Has anybody any experience of this?
> Do I build a static image or a linked image, if I state ahead of time what the platform requirements are etc?
> 
> I want to be able to target :-
> 
> 	- Apple, both intel and M1, I have one of each so that's no an issue.
> 	- *nix on intel/amd, I have Ubuntu under emulation on my intel iMac
>         - Pi, I have a Pi4.
>         - Windows, intel/AMD. I can probably use Parallels for that
> 
> Has anybody been through the process of supporting multiple platform builds of Mercury projects, are there any good links out there that might guide me?
> I have plans for it all but it feels like something somebody else probably already did so I thought I'd ask.

Hi,

Assuming you are using a C backend then it's much the same as
distributing a compiled C program.

For Linux, you are expected to dynamically link to GNU libc. But due to
symbol versioning, if you build on a newer Linux distribution then
chances are the resulting binary will require some symbols newer than
those available on an older Linux distribution. So pick a Linux
distribution with the oldest version of glibc that you wish to support,
and build on that. You can check which glibc version a binary requires
with:

    objdump -p $BINARY | grep GLIBC

If your host is a Linux system, you can use Linux namespaces/containers
instead of emulating a whole machine to run another Linux distribution.

For Windows, I would suggest installing a MinGW cross-compiler on a
Linux system (or MacOS?), installing a copy of Mercury as a
cross-compiler, and using that to build your Windows binaries.

For MacOS, you probably want to set the MACOSX_DEPLOYMENT_TARGET
environment variable to improve compatibility with older MacOS versions.
Mercury's configure script has a --with-macosx-deployment-target switch,
but I've never tested it (don't have a Mac).

Peter