I think it could be worthwhile to fork Alpine and maintain a glibc variant. That way we would keep nearly all of Alpine’s advantages while avoiding the drawbacks of musl.

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Imustaskforhelp 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

I think that I am using something which is essentially https://zapps.app where I can just give it a glibc app and it would give me a folder structure with all the dependencies which I feel like might be similar to nix in only that sense (and not reproducibility or language)

I recently tried to run it in alpine after seeing this blog post and here's what I can say. If you lets say have debian or something or any system where any binary might work, run the script and then it would output a folder/tar and then you can move it anywhere and run it including alpine.

I am thinking of creating an article. But in the meanwhile I have created an asciinema gif to show you guys what I mean. Open to feedback as always.

https://asciinema.org/a/qHGHlU0o4V7VgyyWxtHY2PG5Y

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LeFantome 3 days ago | parent [-]

Very interesting. Thank you. I run Chimera Linux which is also MUSL based, so I have the same issue raised in this article.

I mostly consider it a non-issue because I use Distrobox. An Arch Distrobox gives me access to all the Arch software including the AUR. Graphical apps can even be exported to my desktop launcher. They are technically running on a container but I just click on them like anything else and they show up in their own Wayland window just like everything else. Or, I can run from the command line, including compiling on top of Glibc if I want/need to. And keeping everything up to day just means running yay or pacman.

I can see the advantage of Zapps in some cases though, especially for CLI stuff. Very cool.

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LeFantome 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

What are the disadvantages of musl? It is really just compatibility with Glibc. But the only reason we say that instead of saying that Glibc is incompatible with musl is because of popularity.

If POSIX compliance and Glibc compatibility were the same thing, it would not be a problem.