WriteFreely won't start on older OSes due to glibc issue

[thebaer]

Describe the bug

When attempting to run the WriteFreely v0.15.1 release build on anything before Ubuntu 20.04, it fails to start with this error message:

./writefreely: /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libc.so.6: version `GLIBC_2.28' not found (required by ./writefreely)

This didn't happen with Go 1.19, but with the update to Go 1.21 (#1025), we now see this on systems that don't have this version of glibc (see golang/go#58550). We can't use the CGO_ENABLED=0 fix, because we need CGO for sqlite.

Instead, we should statically compile WriteFreely for release -- see golang/go#26492 (comment) for a potential starting point.

Workaround

Admins can compile WriteFreely from scratch on their target server by cloning the repository and running:

make build

Application configuration

• Single mode or Multi-user mode? n/a
• Database? n/a
• Open registration? n/a
• Federation enabled? n/a

Version or last commit: v0.15.1 (release build)

[sahilmulla]

@thebaer can I work on this?

[thebaer]

@sahilmulla Yes, please do!

[sahilmulla]

@thebaer

• runs on ubuntu:18.04 ldd:2.27 with CGO_ENABLED=1 by adding -ldflags="-extldflags=-static"
  binary size is 43M

any other platforms need to be tested?

[thebaer]

Thanks! We want to be sure it works on Windows, Mac, and Linux. See the build-* directives in Makefile for all platforms / architectures.

Do you mind opening a PR for this once you've tested? Sounds like you'll just need to change the LDFLAGS variable in that file.

[sahilmulla]

@thebaer ok will test on windows and mac and make a PR

[sahilmulla]

@thebaer just curious, how you approach testing on multiple platforms?

I got a Windows machine, I used ubuntu containers to build and test for Linux.

Also for make build tasks can we make them platform agnostic? We could try moving them to go-task?

[thebaer]

For me it's just a manual process. But I'm open to anything we could set something up to do that in a more automated way!

We could also try moving to go-task, yep. If you want to tackle that please feel free, just be sure to separate that into a different PR so we can address each issue separately.

[ellotheth]

Not sure if this is appropriate here, but calling it out since I haven't seen it mentioned: I've been running WriteFreely on Alpine with the gcompat package for glibc compatibility, and I'm getting the same glibc-related errors (in my case, fcntl64: symbol not found). I've tried several combinations of Alpine versions 3.18-3.20 and edge, with the testing package repo.

[DonPiotr]

Not sure if this is appropriate here, but calling it out since I haven't seen it mentioned: I've been running WriteFreely on Alpine with the gcompat package for glibc compatibility, and I'm getting the same glibc-related errors (in my case, fcntl64: symbol not found). I've tried several combinations of Alpine versions 3.18-3.20 and edge, with the testing package repo.

Same here

Without gcompat I get:
-bash: ./writefreely: cannot execute: required file not found