static-tmux

This repository contains a Makefile and patches to produce a fully statically linked tmux binary. When using the vanilla tmux and libevent sources to build a statically linked tmux executable, the generated binary still has hard dependencies on the glibc version of the system that built the binary; a few warnings like this one will be emitted during the build process:

cmd-string.c:331: warning: … requires … the glibc version used for linking

By making a couple of relatively minor changes to the tmux and libevent codebases, the glibc version dependency can be completely eliminated. In tmux, references to getpwnam(3) and getpwuid(3) are eliminated at the cost of tmux not being able to determine a user's home directory and shell if the HOME and SHELL environment variables are unset. I am unaware of any negative effects the changes to libevent may have since libevent re-implements and / or circumvents the disabled features.

The Makefile will not retrieve any dependencies other than libevent, so all other build dependencies must be manually installed before attempting to build the tmux binary. On Debian-based systems, the other dependencies can be installed by running sudo apt-get build-dep tmux.

Licensing

The Makefile is licensed under the 2-clause BSD license, and the patches for tmux and libevent are licensed under each project's respective license.

Instructions

To build the tmux binary, simply run make (which is implicitly make all) inside the root of the repository. Some of the other targets provided by the Makefile include:

• install: Install tmux and its manual. Refer to the description of INSTALLDIR and BINDIR below. The tmux binary will be built as necessary when this target is used.
• uninstall: Remove the tmux binary and manual from INSTALLDIR and the tmux symlink from BINDIR.
• dist: Create a distributable, compressed archive. To install tmux, simply extract the archive on the target system, cd into the tmux directory and run make install. By default, symlinks to the executable will be placed in ~/bin/. To install the symlinks in another directory, override the Makefile variable BINDIR: make BINDIR=/usr/local/bin install. By default, this produces a tar.bz2 archive. Override the DISTEXTENSION to change this, e.g., make dist DISTEXTENSION=tar.xz.
• update: Update the local copy of the tmux source code if it is out of sync with the official repository, and implicitly execute the clean target. If the local copy of tmux is already up-to-date, this will fail with a non-zero exit status, and no files will be modified. This may be useful for scheduling automatic updates (make update && make install).
• clean: Restore the tmux repository to a pristine state and delete the tmux binary if it exists. The clean-tmux target is a synonym for this target.
• cleaner: Same as clean but also execute make distclean inside the libevent folder.
• cleanest: Delete all targets generated by the Makefile in the root of this repository.
• tmux.vim: Generate a Vim syntax highlighting definition for tmux configurations. This should be used in conjunction with an auto-command like autocmd BufNewFile,BufRead {.,}tmux*.conf* setfiletype tmux saved under $VIM/ftdetect/tmux.vim.

The symlink created in BINDIR points to a wrapper script that will show the tmux manual when called with "help" or "man" as its first argument, e.g. tmux help. When passed no additional arguments or anything other than the aforementioned keywords, the tmux binary is launched with whatever arguments were passed to the script.

Matthew Gyurgyik's post "building tmux 1.9a statically", which was used as a reference in creating this repository, may prove useful if any issues arise during the build process.