On Sun, 2003-02-16 at 17:14, Greg Meyer wrote: > -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- > Hash: SHA1 > > I have always wondered this, so I'll throw it out and hopefully someone can > shed some light for me. > > Many times after a new version of Mandrake comes out, I like to rebuild some > of the key packages, like glibc, XFree and KDE with GCC optimizations for my > AthlonXP processor. A few times, I have had some hiccups that required me to > actually modify the souorces or the spec file to get it to build properly on > my machine. > > How is it then, that if there is a bug in the spec file or source that > prevents it from building on my machine, does MandrakeSoft get it to build > for inclusion in the distro to begin with? How are the binary and source > rpms created? > > - -- > Greg Greg,
From my less than expert point of view, I can say that sometimes it just seems to happen. I have had situations like this where I can grab the binary and it works but danged if I can get it to build (Mozilla and AbiWord in the early days are prime examples.) Sometimes it appears to happen because of different upgrade paths and files that got left behind. Either on my box or theirs. Slightly different versions also have had an affect. I've got xxlib-4mdk and they have xxlib-5mdk. (or vice versa) When I do ./configure it's happy, but there is just enough difference to make it blow up. It's kinda like the RH installer anaconda. The source code is there for you to do what you want. But with minimal comments and no docs, I dang near dare you to get it to build. Sometimes especially with AMD vs Intel chips 3dNow vs MMX gets into play. If something is written a little too tightly to one instruction set vs the other I could also see that causing problems of monumental proportion. It's a case where compatible doesn't mean the same. Kinda like Wang in the early days. It's DOS emulator actually ran DOS applications faster than DOS in the native mode. About 4 years ago the company I was with had a video app. The guy who wrote it sent the code and the binary to the CTO. He ran the binary ... great. But when he tried to build it. (He wanted to try a mod.) it wouldn't build. period. Never figured out why but it wouldn't build on a Xeon box, but on the K-6's it built fine. Who knows. James
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