Re: binary compatibility query


On Mon, 5 May 2008, Julian Elischer wrote:

basically if you rely only on the standard posix interfaces and don't do anything exotic then you will "probably" be safe.

the really safe way of course it to make a 6.0 chroot on your machine and compile your app there.

For "raw" UNIX applications, this rule of thumb works well, but not for applications that depend on third-party libraries, languages, or daemons. For example, Java binaries built against 6.0 using packages shipped with 6.0 can't run on 6.1 due to incompatible changes in third-party libraries it depends on. While we try to be pretty careful with the base system, we have no control over third party applications, and as far as I know, we perform no testing (nor even have policies) for addressing that sort of incompatibility. The safety of depending on those third-party libraries pretty much corresponds to the carefulness of the thirdy-party library authors and their attention to those same sorts of details.

Robert N M Watson
Computer Laboratory
University of Cambridge
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