Hi Yasha,

Yasha Karant <[log in to unmask]> writes:

> My intention is this. There exist applications on various other
> distributions (Fedora, Ubuntu, SuSE, etc.) that do not exist and will
> not build under SL 7. The intent would be to setup a development
> machine of the other distro, build the application from source as
> static as possible (with bloat by this mechanism), include whatever
> directories or files that need to be present, and then run the thing
> under SL 7 . 

I suggest just simply trying it.  Here's what I see on Ubuntu 14.04 for
a trivial test:

$ cat foo.c
int main() {return 0;}
$ gcc -o foo -static foo.c

$ ldd foo
	not a dynamic executable
$ ./foo
$ echo $?
0

I don't have SL7 handy, but copying that to RHEL 6.4 I get the same
results for those last three commands.

> In a worst case, rather that using a physical machine,
> install the other distro in a virtual machine under VirtualBox (that
> runs very well under SL 7) -- with enough disk space assigned to the
> Virtual Box machine to allow for such a build. Some applications (such
> as a full window manager) I would not consider, but there are others
> of more limited generality that I would.

I want to have easy access to a broad set of Linux distributions for the
purpose of building and testing some software stacks for the various
projects I'm involved in.  I started out using VirtualBox to run Fedora
Core 20 on my Ubuntu 14.04 workstation.  It worked but was a real pain
for me to set up and use and was noticeably slower when comparing the
same processes running on the native host.  There's no way I could
efficiently scale this setup beyond even one virtual host.  The setup
was enough of a show stopper but the disk space for multiple VM images
would start to become annoying.

I then switched to using Docker containers and have been hugely
impressed.  Setup and use is very straight-forward.  No messing around
with GUIs to start but also it lends itself to both scripting/automation
as well as one-off hacking.  I can not notice any runtime performance
difference between processes running in a container and ones running on
the native host.  And what's fairly killer is the smart way that images
are overlayed to maximize reuse.  It's kind of like git but for OS
images.

-Brett.