[plug] old binaries

[Anthony J. Breeds-Taurima]

On Tue, 6 Nov 2001, Rob Dunne wrote:

> On a broader note -- why doesnt RH7.1 simply support older binaries?
> It hardly seems reasonable that upgrade a system and then find that 
> programs in /usr/local/bin no longer work.

Hmmm what I meant to say was that if you compile an app on RedHat 7.x (default
no funkey stuff) then you cannot take that app to any other version of RedHat
(or indeed linux in general, unless they ship the same broken compiler) and 
have it run.  Apps compiled on older versions living in /usr/local will 
correctly function.

RedHat shipped the non-standard compiler because they said it would force
a larger beta market.  They did a similar thing many moons ago with glibc.
at the time it was buggy and was lokking like it would be a while before
it was accepted.  they packaged it into a dirsto and within months most of the
bigg issues were gone and other distros followed suit.

The same is happening with gcc.  At the time you couldn't build a working 
kernel with it (hence the kgcc (Kernel GCC) package), you can now, it's not 
offically supported but it will boot :).  They only problem is that the gcc 
they shipped is NOT going to be the same binary layout as gcc 3.0 so like I 
said earlier nothing else will talk to it.

When RedHat did this there were all sorts of screams on many mailing lists
world wide, not least of which was linux-kernel.  It died down now very 
few people seem to hold a grudge.  It still bites people but in the whole it
seems to have helped gcc 3.0 along, which was RedHats stated goal.

Yours Tony.

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