Binary release incompatible with glibc version

[hayley-leblanc]

Not sure if this is really an issue or something that you can/want to fix, but the version of glibc required by the GitHub Linux release binary is not supported on some current/recent Linux distros. I use Pop! OS 22.04, which is based on Ubuntu 22.04, and I get this error trying to run the Verus binary from the release:

./verus: /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libm.so.6: version `GLIBC_2.38' not found (required by ./verus)

ldd --version outputs ldd (Ubuntu GLIBC 2.35-0ubuntu3.8) 2.35.

I know 22.04 isn't the newest Ubuntu version, but it is the latest stable Pop! OS version. I haven't tested this on other distros, but based on a bit of Googling it looks like the latest stable version of Debian is also behind glibc 2.38, so I suspect it won't work there either.

I initially ran into this issue trying to use verus-analyzer, which pulls in the current Verus binary release by default.

[jaybosamiya-ms]

I suspect this is due to the use of ubuntu-latest here:

verus/.github/workflows/ci.yml

Lines 216 to 217 in 08df165

	smoke-test-and-release-linux:
	runs-on: ubuntu-latest

Until very recently, ubuntu-latest meant Ubuntu 22.04 on GitHub Actions. However, GitHub is slowly rolling out an upgrade from 22.04 to 24.04 for ubuntu-latest (see actions/runner-images#10636), and it seems like Verus's upgrade has now finished its place in the roll-out.

Since until some days ago, our CI was using 22.04, I don't see it as being a major issue to simply change the above to ubuntu-22.04 to force it to use 22.04, thereby supporting more distros with the release. GitHub will have support for ubuntu-22.04 as a runner for ~2 more years, by which time I expect most distros to have moved on, so we can bump it to 24.04 then.

A heavier-handed alternative is to build our binaries as static binaries (possibly using musl) which might allow us to stay on ubuntu-latest while supporting even much older Linux distros. I suspect this is unnecessary, and simply setting CI to ubuntu-22.04 rather than ubuntu-latest is probably the right move.

As a point of comparison, verusfmt uses 20.04 in its release process, in order to maintain support for a large set of distros. I'll probably have to change that to 22.04 when GitHub Actions phases out its 20.04 runners, but generally speaking, release builds using an older version works great as a way to support things.

[utaal]

@hayley-leblanc can you try the next release? (once it finishes building)

@jaybosamiya-ms thanks for diagnosing!