Hello,

I asked (and still think about it) myself the same questions.

You are right and I already posted about it on this forum, the best Linux distro to build an app is CentOS / RHEL because this is the only one that is maintained for 7 years so you can run a security updated OS with old libs.

So, you can be sure that all the other Linux distros maintained will use fresher libs.

I used until recently CentOS 3 but with Qt 4.5, it began to be a pain to compile Qt so I switched to CentOS 4. CentOS 3 will expire next year so it was not so important to stick with it.

Next, how to distribute your app. If you don't use exotic libs, I think all dependencies will be met if someone install a popular Linux distro in a standard way (without stream-lined it too much).

So the bash wrapper script with LD_LIBRARY_PATH could be the best (if you need to link dynamically, it's required if you want to use the LGPL release of Qt) and it will be simple for users to untar and unzip it and use it without the need to be root to install the software.

But in case of explicit needs when you really need dependencies or doing some stuffs on the system when installing, I have wrapped binary and Qt libs (all build on the CentOS 4) in a deb file on the latest Debian (it run fine both on Debian & Ubuntu) and on a RPM that seems to be generic enough to run both on Red Hat / Mandriva & SuSE systems