XEarthLayer 0.4.8 released
Prebuilt packages install again on Ubuntu, Debian and RHEL. Building from source now says what it actually needs. Nothing in the running program changed.
XEarthLayer 0.4.8 is available from the downloads page or the GitHub release.
Nothing about how XEarthLayer runs has changed in this release. It exists because installing it was broken for anyone not on a recent distribution of their Linux system.
Packages install again on older distributions
The Debian package and the Linux tarball required glibc 2.39, so they would not start on anything older than Ubuntu 24.04. Ubuntu 22.04 LTS, Debian 12 and RHEL 9 were all affected, and the failure was an unhelpful message about libc6 being out of date.
Our release binary is built on a machine image supplied by GitHub, and when that image moved from Ubuntu 22.04 to 24.04, the requirement changed unexpectedly. Both packages are now built in a pinned environment, which lowers the requirement to glibc 2.34 and covers those distributions again. A check now fails the release outright if that requirement ever creeps up, so this cannot happen quietly again.
Building from source with improved feedback
XEarthLayer needs a recent Rust compiler, more recent than most distributions package. Building with an older one stopped at a code formatting error about an unrelated function, which read as though something was wrong with our source rather than with the toolchain. Building now stops immediately and names the version it requires.
Installing from source also ran the full contributor test suite first, which meant a formatting detail in code you did not write could block your install. It no longer does.
The getting started guide now covers what building actually requires, and leads with the packaged installs for everyone who does not need to build at all.
Thanks to the user who reported this by email, and for the patience to keep going through several failed attempts before writing in.