FEATURE REQUEST: Target Glibc version 2.26

[cshanahan]

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.
The application fails due to glibc version. Installation works, but the application doesn't work as expected. I can install and launch the application without error; however, when I try to load a PCAP file I get an error message related to missing GLIBC_2.27.

I am running Brim v0.27.0 on openSUSE Leap 15.3 with glibc 2.26. I tried other RPM-based distros as well - same error.

The current RPM package is built against glibc version 2.27. Many current Linux distributions still use glibc 2.26 or older. For example, all stable versions of SLES and openSUSE Leap use glibc 2.26.
I'm curious what RPM-based distros other people are using. RHEL, CentOS, and many others haven't moved to glibc 2.27 yet. Ubuntu has, but that's fine for the DEB package.

Describe the solution you'd like
Could you build the RPM package against glibc 2.26?
If not, could you create an AppImage package? That would solve this problem, too.

Thank you

[philrz]

@cshanahan: In answer to your question about other RPM-based distros, the article at https://github.com/brimdata/brim/wiki/Supported-Platforms summarizes the distros that were last tested as part of a more exhaustive exercise. As indicated there, CentOS 8 1905 (release date 2019-09-24 per wikipedia) was used to test, since that also seems to provide adequate coverage for RHEL. I just now did a quick smoke test of installing Brim v0.27.0 on CentOS 8 1905 (fresh install to a VM with no additional updates added) to make sure nothing has regressed since then and I'm still able to load a pcap without complaint. Per your original point, the output of an ldd --version ldd on this distro does indeed show GNU libc 2.28, so I guess that would explain why the libc version problem doesn't show up there.

Per your point about AppImage, I know the Brim team has an open issue #685 to track that topic.