[plug] Slightly OT.. Gentoo users?

[Craig Ringer]

> I have a suggestion for you, then. It should be possible to run RH7 as a
> 'chrooted' environment under a modern kernel - some admin tools in the 
> child environment won't  work, etc, but it should be otherwise fine.

Super-senile now.

Sorry folks, but I did miss something important:

You may not even need to copy the entire environment; it's quite 
possible that simply copying all the libraries required into a directory 
on the new server and setting the LD_LIBRARY_PATH will do. 'ldd' will 
tell you what libs the app needs, then you can find out what libs they 
need etc. Once you have the full list, copy them to (eg)

/usr/local/legacy-app-name-libs

and copy over the app. Run the app using a wrapper script that 
essentially does:

LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/usr/local/legacy-app-name-libs
export LD_LIBRARY_PATH
exec /path/to/app

and it should pick up the RH7 libs first. This gets trickier if the app 
links to things like PAM, of course, where config files are required.

Craig Ringer