Version 4.0 is a new release; it is intended to replace the functionality provided by the XBB v3.4 Docker images.

The xPack XBB Bootstrap is a temporary solution intended to replace the functionality provided by the XBB v3.4 Docker images until separate packages will be available with all required tools.

There are separate binaries for macOS (Intel 64-bit, Apple Silicon 64-bit) and GNU/Linux (Intel 64-bit, Arm 32/64-bit).

Download

The binary files are available from GitHub Releases.

Prerequisites

  • GNU/Linux Intel 64-bit: any system with GLIBC 2.27 or higher (like Ubuntu 18 or later, Debian 10 or later, RedHat 8 later, Fedora 29 or later, etc)
  • GNU/Linux Arm 32/64-bit: any system with GLIBC 2.27 or higher (like Raspberry Pi OS, Ubuntu 18 or later, Debian 10 or later, RedHat 8 later, Fedora 29 or later, etc)
  • Intel macOS 64-bit: 10.13 or later
  • Apple Silicon macOS 64-bit: 11.6 or later

Install

The full details of installing the xPack XBB Bootstrap on various platforms are presented in the separate Install page.

Easy install

The easiest way to install XBB Bootstrap is with xpm by using the binary xPack, available as @xpack-dev-tools/xbb-bootstrap from the npmjs.com registry.

With the xpm tool available, installing the latest version of the package and adding it as a dependency for a project is quite easy:

cd my-project
xpm init # Only at first use.

xpm install @xpack-dev-tools/xbb-bootstrap@latest

ls -l xpacks/.bin

To install this specific version, use:

xpm install @xpack-dev-tools/xbb-bootstrap@4.0

For xPacks aware tools, it is also possible to install XBB Bootstrap globally, in the user home folder.

xpm install --global @xpack-dev-tools/xbb-bootstrap@latest --verbose

Uninstall

To remove the links from the current project:

cd my-project

xpm uninstall @xpack-dev-tools/xbb-bootstrap

To completely remove the package from the central xPacks store:

xpm uninstall --global @xpack-dev-tools/xbb-bootstrap

Compliance

The xPack XBB Bootstrap tools generally use the official sources of the tools, without changes.

The included tools are:

  • bash 5.1.8
  • bison 3.8.2
  • coreutils 9.0
  • curl 7.80.0
  • diffutils 3.8
  • dos2unix 7.4.2
  • gawk 5.1.1
  • gettext 0.21
  • gnutls 3.7.2
  • gnupg 2.3.3
  • m4 1.4.19
  • make 4.3
  • makedepend 1.0.6
  • openssl 1.1.1q
  • p7zip 17.04
  • patch 2.7.6
  • patchelf 0.14.3
  • perl 5.34
  • pkg_config 0.29.2
  • python3 3.9.9
  • rhash 1.4.3
  • re2c 2.2
  • sed 4.8
  • tar 1.34
  • tcl 8.6.12
  • texinfo 6.8
  • wget 1.20.3
  • xz 5.2.5

The versions match those in XBB v3.4, except p7zip and rhash, which were upgraded to simplify the build.

Changes

There are no functional changes.

Bug fixes

  • none

Enhancements

  • none

Known problems

  • bzcmp is a link pointing to the absolute location where the package was built, and fails to start
  • Perl scripts originally used absolute paths to invoke the interpreter, making them non-relocatable; the paths were replaced by simply perl, which is functional but requires the desired interpreter to be in the PATH; for xPacks this means the xpacks/.bin folder must be in the path, condition normally met when invoked via xpm actions.
  • the Python associated scripts (2to3-3.9, idle-3.9, pydoc3.9, python-3.9-config) also were non-relocatable, and were adjusted to invoke python3 directly, requiring it to be in the PATH.

Shared libraries

On all platforms the packages are standalone, and expect only the standard runtime to be present on the host.

All dependencies that are build as shared libraries are copied locally in the libexec folder (or in the same folder as the executable for Windows).

DT_RPATH and LD_LIBRARY_PATH

On GNU/Linux the binaries are adjusted to use a relative path:

$ readelf -d library.so | grep runpath
 0x000000000000001d (RPATH)            Library rpath: [$ORIGIN]

In the GNU ld.so search strategy, the DT_RPATH has the highest priority, higher than LD_LIBRARY_PATH, so if this later one is set in the environment, it should not interfere with the xPack binaries.

Please note that previous versions, up to mid-2020, used DT_RUNPATH, which has a priority lower than LD_LIBRARY_PATH, and does not tolerate setting it in the environment.

@rpath and @loader_path

Similarly, on macOS, the binaries are adjusted with install_name_tool to use a relative path.

Documentation

The original documentation for the included components is available online.

Build

The binaries for all supported platforms (Windows, macOS and GNU/Linux) were built using the xPack Build Box (XBB), a set of build environments based on slightly older distributions, that should be compatible with most recent systems.

The scripts used to build this distribution are in:

  • distro-info/scripts

For the prerequisites and more details on the build procedure, please see the README-MAINTAINER page.

CI tests

Before publishing, a set of simple tests were performed on an exhaustive set of platforms. The results are available from:

Tests

The binaries were testes on Intel Ubuntu 18 LTS 64-bit and macOS 10.13 / 11.6.

Checksums

The SHA-256 hashes for the files are:

ee1a9b3d5df6e6d9d5c6215d66bd1b80c81ea19724984b7386f05bd8a5fb9f45
xpack-xbb-bootstrap-4.0-darwin-arm64.tar.gz

13af2fc26d334321606cdbd4b7f8c97800a89f1461e60f701f2dadb40609979a
xpack-xbb-bootstrap-4.0-darwin-x64.tar.gz

cf533d08d3c92c335b99cddd7aeb15dfcef55d0d3980ec57039ec3d1f167f34b
xpack-xbb-bootstrap-4.0-linux-arm.tar.gz

94b7a734d0f75398279a2179f6046efa381a4665d3039e3d8bd6f6f25b33864d
xpack-xbb-bootstrap-4.0-linux-arm64.tar.gz

8c64e44b2b02c8d59ded9120d787c223c020a0ac0f45b633b1012cd99b302673
xpack-xbb-bootstrap-4.0-linux-x64.tar.gz

Deprecation notices

32-bit support

Support for 32-bit Intel Linux and Intel Windows was dropped in 2022. Support for 32-bit Arm Linux (armv7l) will be preserved for a while, due to the large user base of 32-bit Raspberry Pi systems.

Linux minimum requirements

Support for RedHat 7 was dropped in 2022 and the minimum requirement was raised to GLIBC 2.27, available starting with Ubuntu 18, Debian 10 and RedHat 8.

Download analytics

Credit to Shields IO for the badges and to Somsubhra/github-release-stats for the individual file counters.