Linux software packaging is usually somewhat of a shitshow, with binaries linked to specific libraries that need to be installed at specific locations to work.

In the usual case, it all kinda works since people pull files from package managers or ship their software in Docker, but I've often felt the need for statically built software that I can just copy anywhere and run it without any kind of setup.

I've felt that not only would that simplify deployment (your Docker image contains binaries for just that software instead of zillions of files and crap of all sorts), you can also use these for recovering servers with borked internet connectivity, or for other kinds of interesting use cases like the one I'll describe right below this paragraph. This is not just some kind of hypothetical, pie in the sky thing -- Golang already has this, and its binary compilation and deployment story is appreciated by most who use the language.

Most recently, I was working on some CI configuration for a personal project, and I was quite tired of having to pull in utilities like curl, wget and ssh as part of these CI jobs. I could automatically install these utilities but my projects use various images, and some of them don't even have a package manager! And even if they had, I had to do the whole dance of detecting distributions and invoking specific package managers.

So, instead, I worked on building these packages statically. My CI jobs have become very simple nowadays: I just configured my CI runner to mount these binaries in the CI container, and I can just invoke these commands right away.

Currently, there are only three packages (the ones I needed for the above project). I intend to expand upon the list of available packages if there is any interest in this.

Thanks!