stargazing

this repository contains experiments in building third-party software against cosmopolitan libc. the provided scripts produce APEs (Actually Portable Executables) that run on Linux, Mac, Windows, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, and NetBSD. however, despite running on all platforms, not every feature is available on every platform. cosmopolitan already does a tremendous job at polyfilling missing features across platforms, but pre-existing software still takes a lot of tweaking to before becoming fully functional.

notes

Docker

this project uses Dockerfiles to allow for mostly-reproducible builds. podman is used instead of docker, because the official docker software is commercial and obnoxious.

neither docker nor podman is required for executing the binaries. binaries are to be isolated and extracted from the resulting containers. those binaries can then be transferred across platforms, like any other APE.

in the future, it would be nice to use something like what Void Linux does for its packages, which would entirely sidestep the clunkiness of Dockerfiles and working with containers.

make no mistake, this project does not strive for reproducible builds in any way that nix does.

Host OS

this project must be built on a host running Linux. if you are not running Linux, use a VM of some sort. i personally use VirtualBox running Alpine Linux. i have not tried building with WSL2.