I noticed that the MongoDB CE download center contains linux_x86_64 (generic Linux) builds for v4.0 and before, but not for v4.2 and v4.4, as these only have distro-specific builds available. Where did the generic Linux build go for those new versions?
To explain why I need a generic Linux version, I’m developing an application in TypeScript NodeJS and I want to use the jest-mongodb package, which uses mongodb-memory-server under the hood. This needs to download a MongoDB binary, for which it tries to recognise the distro I’m running. However, since I’m running Manjaro Linux (based on Arch, I know there is no official build for Arch Linux) it fails to download a distro-specific version, thus it falls back to the generic linux_x86_64 version. Since we’re running v4.2 in production, I would like to be able to run my tests against MongoDB v4.2, but this requires a generic linux_x86_64 variant of v4.2 (or above), so that the tests will run successfully on all of our development machines as well as the CI.
Thanks for your question. We discussed the rationale behind the removal of Legacy Generic Linux x64 Tar packages in this blog post, which I encourage you to read.
Thank you for your reply, the blog post certainly clarifies why the generic Linux tar packages were removed.
Regarding the JIRA issue that you’re referring to, I’d love to vote on it, but it seems I need an account on the MongoDB JIRA in order to do so, which I don’t have. Would you be able to cast a vote for me, please?
Additionally, it may be interesting for this issue to note the existence of the following AUR packages that already provide unofficial means of installing MongoDB on Arch Linux / Manjaro / derivatives:
mongodb - Builds from source, not very practical for end-users as it takes hours to build and requires a lot of resources.
mongodb-bin - Installs a prebuilt MongoDB binary extracted from the official MongoDB Ubuntu repository packages.
Perhaps these can serve as inspiration for an official implementation of the Arch Linux build.