Statically-link pre-compiled binaries

[mleonhard]

Problem

Hi mdBook Team,
Thanks so much for making this tool! I'm using it to publish https://www.applin.dev/docs/ .

Running the pre-built binary on Render.com in a Rust build is failing:

curl --silent --show-error --location https://github.com/rust-lang/mdBook/releases/download/v0.4.35/mdbook-v0.4.35-x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu.tar.gz --output mdbook.tar.gz --time-cond mdbook.tar.gz
echo '4ef777bfcb3fd01687deed990372a6eb5e125f79b592014b0ac09b61595f0b34  mdbook.tar.gz' >mdbook.tar.gz.sha256
shasum -a 256 mdbook.tar.gz.sha256
tar xzvf mdbook.tar.gz mdbook
mdbook build docs/
mdbook: /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libm.so.6: version `GLIBC_2.29' not found (required by mdbook)

This is a problem with Render's Linux image having incompatible versions of libm and libc. I fixed the build by making it download and build mdbook, which is slow.

Proposed Solution

I wish mdbook was statically linked. Then it would always work, even on systems with broken or missing libraries.

What do you think about statically linking the pre-compiled mdbook binaries?

Cheers,
Michael

Notes

No response

[KFearsoff]

Static linking with glibc is notoriously hard and error-prone:

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/31770604/how-to-generate-statically-linked-executables
https://users.rust-lang.org/t/statically-link-executable-with-glibc/32648
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/3430400/linux-static-linking-is-dead

I tried building it statically myself and failed, miserably. I'm afraid this one is a WONTFIX, as sad as that sounds.

However, there are a few things that could be done to make glibc struggles a bit less painful:

1. Musl supports static linking out of the box without much issue, so we could publish binaries built against musl
2. We can ship Docker containers to isolate mdbook's dependencies from the host system (though installing Docker Engine on a system that has glibc issues would be a very miserable exercise for the reader)
3. We can ship a systemd portable service, but it might also be pretty useless if glibc itself is borked
4. You can use Nix! It's a binary package manager that is linked statically, and it can be used to install the whole dependency tree of mdbook isolated from the host environment
5. We can ship a Nix bundle. It uses some very clever tricks to create no-runtime, no-installation, distro-agnostic self-sufficient packages. It has some drawbacks, but it's very universal

For your particular use case, I think solution number 1 is best. It would be indeed nice to have musl static binaries.

[KFearsoff]

@rustbot label +A-Installation +S-Wishlist

[Sytten]

There is a musl build now so it should be ok?