GLIBC incompatibility for scala-cli 1.8.0+ on RHEL8

[tymcauley]

Version(s)

1.8.0 and 1.8.1

Describe the bug

I'm using scala-cli on RHEL8 (8.10), and when trying to run scala-cli versions 1.8.0 or 1.8.1, I get an error related to scala-cli needing a more recent version of GLIBC than is available on my platform. scala-cli now seems to require GLIBC 2.32/2.34, but I only have 2.28 available on my system:

$ /lib64/libc.so.6
GNU C Library (GNU libc) stable release version 2.28.
...

To Reproduce

$ cs install scala-cli:1.7.1
Wrote scala-cli
$ scala-cli version
Scala CLI version: 1.7.1
Scala version (default): 3.6.4
...
$ cs install scala-cli:1.8.0
Wrote scala-cli
$ scala-cli version
/home/users/USERNAME/.local/share/coursier/bin/.scala-cli.aux: /lib64/libc.so.6: version `GLIBC_2.32' not found (required by /home/users/USERNAME/.local/share/coursier/bin/.scala-cli.aux)
/home/users/USERNAME/.local/share/coursier/bin/.scala-cli.aux: /lib64/libc.so.6: version `GLIBC_2.34' not found (required by /home/users/USERNAME/.local/share/coursier/bin/.scala-cli.aux)
$ cs install scala-cli:1.8.1
Wrote scala-cli
$ scala-cli version
<same error as above>

Expected behaviour

I would like to continue using the latest scala-cli on this system, we weren't planning on updating to RHEL9 until later this year. Looks like RHEL 9.6 ships with glibc 2.34 (source from distrowatch).

[tgodzik]

Thanks for reporting! This is a problem for the native image generation, we use the GLIBC available on github actions, we might be able to go back to ubuntu-22.04, though I think we had some issues with it. @Gedochao is back next week so he might remember.

As a workaround, you can use the jar based version of Scala CLI. I think it can be installed from coursier with --prebuilt-binaries=false (though I haven't tested it)

[Gedochao]

I do recall something was missing in ubuntu-22.04... not sure what it was, though.
Thing is, all Scala CLI components got migrated to being built on 24.04; to even test, we'd need to downgrade it everywhere... which I'm not sure we will want to do.

For now, your best bet is as suggested above, try using the JVM version or upgrading glibc.
You can also use an older Scala CLI launcher and pass --cli-version 1.8.1, that should be the equivalent of installing the JVM version.

[jackkoenig]

As a fellow traveller in the RHEL8 world, the scala-cli releases already provide fully statically linked binaries that work on RHEL8: (e.g. for v1.8.1: scala-cli-x86_64-pc-linux-static.gz).

One potential sharp edge is that, AFAICT at least, Coursier supports either the dynamically linked version, or jar-based, but not fully statically linked--perhaps this would be a good feature request for Coursier?