linux build without executables

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lukeve
Posts: 2
Joined: Mon Mar 16, 2020 7:55 pm

linux build without executables

Post by lukeve »

I would like to know why the "linux" folder was put in the tarball.
I guess every Linux distribution has it own version of JRE and ffmpeg, doesn't it?
That makes build slower and tarball bigger.
Morevover, they are useless in non-Intel architectures, e.g. on Raspberry.
Is there any "minimal" build for Linux?
Thank you.
Nadahar
Posts: 1990
Joined: Tue Jun 09, 2015 5:57 pm

Re: linux build without executables

Post by Nadahar »

I can't answer everything, but I think the reason why they did it is a lack of knowledge about "the Linux world" and the fact that not all versions of the JRE and FFmpeg are equal. Not all versions of these will work, and in particular the "latest" probably won't work.
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SubJunk
Lead Developer
Posts: 3705
Joined: Sun May 27, 2012 4:12 pm

Re: linux build without executables

Post by SubJunk »

It's a good question. Basically we get a lot of bug reports from users when they are using different versions of dependencies so we attempt to make sure that everyone uses our supported versions by bundling them.
In particular, we support version 8 of JRE, but it's up to version 14 now, and versions after 8 have been known to break (we had bugs in versions 9 and 11 until they were fixed in Java itself) so bundling JRE allows us to avoid the endless stream of bug reports from Ubuntu users who have the latest JRE installed (which is a vast majority of our Linux users)
It's not perfect and like you said there are times when that approach creates its own bugs, but it's quite time-consuming sometimes to troubleshoot bugs that are related to dependency versioning, particularly subdependency versioning for dynamic libraries.
We welcome contributions to make the situation better by supporting more types of Linux installations. Having a "minimal" build for Linux probably won't be done, but you can remove the linux folder manually and it should fallback to the system versions.
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