[developers] LUI binaries in the main LKB repository

[Stephan Oepen]

hi again, woodley,

returning to a thread from a couple of years ago :-).  dan is visiting
this week, and we are seeking to consolidate things in the LOGON tree
for premium support of the latest ERG release.  in doing so, we
re-discovered that the yzlui binaries in LOGON (contributed by you in
february 2014) actually both are compiled for 32-bit environments.  i
dimly recall that was a deliberate decision at the time, but today it
causes dan problems that he used to not be aware of (because he had
back-dated his yzlui locally to an older 64-bit binary of unknown
provenance); somewhat curiously, it does not cause me problems,
apparently because i happen to have the right set of 32-bit
compatibility libraries installed.

hence ...

> I believe there is no reason a 64-bit yzlui could not be built, and I also believe I still am in possession of an elderly RedHat VM, although I am not sure it is a 64-bit VM.
>
> Is the problem that running 32-bit binaries on a 64-bit system requires extra compatibility libraries, and you would like to remove that dependency?

yes, indeed.  it is getting increasingly difficult to make users
install the right set of compatibility libraries, i feel.  and i
believe we had concluded (in 2014) that yzlui actually had to be
dynamically linked and that at least several of its shared library
dependencies could not be bundled with the binary, for proper font and
unicode support on a specific local system.  does that resonate with
your memory from those days?

so, could we take you up on the kind offer to try and cook a 64-bit
version of yzlui in a suitably rustic linux environment (RHEL6 appears
to be at glibc version 2.12 today; i suspect the virtual machine image
you have may have originated from here)?

best wishes; the snow is adorable!  oe