Do any of you develop software that must run on multiple linux
distros?

I'm trying to work with a company that distributes a simulator that
runs on linux.  Unfortunately, they have decided that their corporate
standard distro is going to be arch.  

This is causing them no end of trouble internally, because they don't
seem to be able to get a standard desktop everywhere (it's too easy to
upgrade packages and not very pleasant to downgrade them,
apparently).  This may be a problem with source distros, or it may be
incompetence; I don't know, and that's not really my problem.

MY problem is that they keep squirting out software builds that are
extremely difficult to run.  I have a mix of Mandrake and Fedora boxes
to run this stuff on, and everytime I get a new build, it's a mess.
They use wxWidgets' libwx_base, which seems to have a bunch of
incompatible versions with the same version number (!).  But that's
manageable; I just copy around a particular version, and I'm fine.

But they also use libstdc++, and that's a total nightmare, since it
seems to rely on other libraries.  Bringing along a libstdc++.so just
causes the load of that library to fail.

I've been trying to get these guys to just statically compile the dang
thing, but they don't seem to want to.  Is there anything we can do
short of that to manage these problems with the libraries?  If things
are this bad, how does ANYONE manage to distribute linux programs in
binary?  [I know, it would be great if they would distribute source,
but they won't...]  Just avoid libstdc++?

Thanks!
R

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