[fosap]

I'm not sure, but doesn't the opensuse build service tries to solve these problems? I haven't used it, but I think i slurps source code and builds packages for multiple distributions.

And I absolutely agree with Linus view on linking. I just tried to install ffmpeg on opensuse on a desktop pc. All I wanted was one statically linked binary. I had to dig a wiki, follow outdated build instructions (not nearly enough dependencies where listed, I had to go back several times, configure runs like 20 minutes), it took hours. For one simple binary. FFmpeg could put on their homepage.

[rodgerd]

Build services are great if you have the source to everything. But the reality is I've got software I paid for on Linux that doesn't run on a modern distro after a decade, and software I paid for on Windows that's 15 years old and runs fine.

[shaurz]

That doesn't solve the problem for commercial software and only works around the problem for open source.

In fact I ran in to this problem today. We build on CentOS 5 in order to support some customers who still use it. Unfortunately we linked against libssl.so.6 which is no longer available on newer distributions. We can't even statically link due to licence issues.