Heya! I often need some common tools (e.g. strace, tcpdump, …) on obscure embedded devices which do not offer a package manager. Being tired with fighting dependencies and read only root file systems I created binaries! I wrote a small script which downloads buildroot, builds it with a predefined config, and pushes the result to my server. The results are statically linked using the musl C-library and the binaries run standalone without dependencies. The sources are here: https://github.com/rumpelsepp/binaries

Currently only x86_64 is built, but I want to support more architectures making this thing usable for people. I hope Drew is ok with buildroot causing load every now and then on builds.sr.ht…

Let's test it:

$ file buildroot-2020.02/output/target/usr/bin/strace
buildroot-2020.02/output/target/usr/bin/strace: ELF 64-bit LSB executable, x86-64, version 1 (SYSV), statically linked, with debug_info, not stripped
$ ldd buildroot-2020.02/output/target/usr/bin/strace
        not a dynamic executable