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Comment by teacup50 | Hacker News Reader

Shipping binary software for Linux is like playing a never-ending game of Space Invaders.

GOG's position is totally understandable.

No, it's not. Their position is (at least from their last status update): "we are trying to come up with a long term support methodology, and didn't find one yet". It takes them more than a year to design it. It doesn't sound reasonable to me.

Shipping binaries on Linux is nearly impossible on a long term support basis.

FatELF would of addressed at least some of these problems, but was largely rejected by the larger community of people not shipping proprietary products on Linux: https://icculus.org/fatelf/

Might Docker containers be a valid solution to this? Shipping old games is a sorta-kinda-similar problem to shipping frozen versions of web-apps.

That can work probably, since Docker claims that it doesn't impose big overhead, so it can be suitable for gaming.

You would probably find there are performance penalties in areas Docker don't really bother benchmarking or even talking about since they don't align to the design goals. I've only seen some fairly rudimentary demonstrations of VNC and X over the Network for isolating GUI apps in Docker.

Docker author here. I really doubt performance would be a problem. Namespaced linux processes access devices the same way every other process does: by getting a file descriptor to it and making syscalls against that. What we need to figure out is a portable way for a docker container to declare "I need access to the following devices". I would love to work with anyone interested to add that to the docker APIs for 1.0. I think long-term stable binary delivery is an important thing to do and I would like to help.

Ping me at solomon@docker.com about this anytime.

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