On Wed, Mar 11, 2009 at 1:29 PM, Denis Koroskin <[email protected]> wrote: > On Wed, 11 Mar 2009 15:14:44 +0300, Tomas Lindquist Olsen > <[email protected]> wrote: > >> On Wed, Mar 11, 2009 at 12:56 PM, Michel Fortin >> <[email protected]> wrote: >>> >>> On 2009-03-11 04:50:37 -0400, Walter Bright <[email protected]> >>> said: >>> >>>> The source works just fine. The binaries don't. The new lib distros >>>> don't >>>> include the old lib, and vice versa. Often the missing lib isn't >>>> available. >>>> It's an ongoing nuisance. >>>> >>>> It isn't like Windows, where the basic api's have been unchanged for >>>> nearly 20 years. >>>> >>>> Mac OSX is the worst of the lot, there you get a "bus error" if you >>>> build >>>> for 10.5 and run it on 10.4. >>> >>> Yeah, the error message is bad. But on Mac OS X if you build for 10.4 >>> (either by building on 10.4 or using the 10.4 SDK bundled with Xcode) >>> it'll >>> be forward-compatible with the newer versions of Mac OS X yet to come. >>> For >>> instance, I can run apps compiled on 10.0 quite well on 10.5, with no >>> tweaking at all. Seems on Linux if you choose the old lib it won't run on >>> the newer distos. That looks worse to me. >> >> This is usually not a problem as most linux software is free (as in >> freedom) and has open source code though. >> >> Commercial applications can simply provide multiple binaries. Just >> like the situation is getting for XP/Vista as well (I know, it's only >> really games, and it's not really the same situation, but anyway ...) >> > > It's more like x86/x86_64 situation. > >> DMD source code being available is a good start, but as I understand >> it, Linux distributions are still not allowed to redistribute it ? Or >> binaries of a modified source build ? >> >> -Tomas >> > > Is there a need for that? Gentoo ebuild can automatically fetch source code > from digitalmars.com and compile the binary (given the ebuild, of course), > and I believe other distros can do the same. >
Maybe it's not so bad as I think, but sometimes a build fails, and beginner programmers who, lets say wanted to try D, has no means to fix that, and the binary is broken ... -Tomas
