Hi Greg KH, >What specific problems with "backward-compatibility" do you see on Linux today? Where are you having problems that you see needs to be solved. Specifics please.
I'm happy that one of the best is listening :) OK: my own experience: I took tuxracer.RPM from Mandrake Linux 9.2 to Mandrake Linux 10.1 (one year difference) and it crashed on start. Unfortunately, I haven't done any stracing/debugging to get more facts, because it was a looong time ago. But then again, if some commercial company release app XYZ based on Qt1, it is very unlikely to run on modern Linux systems. Additionally, I have worked with the "klik" package management team and we had two goals: achieve cross-Linux compatibility of our packages, and provide one-click install (something that 10.3 does, but very differently from klik). We (klik team) achieved one-click install goal fully, but the cross-Linux compatibility is flaky at best (very alpha stage). The project received much testing from openSUSE/Debian/Ubuntu community, so there you get good stability (>90% apps run), while on RedHat/Fedora we only achieved about <30% working apps. We can't really blame Fedora for this, it's just every distro is different and sometimes, a small difference such as a symlink makes a difference between a running app and a crashing app. ( libpcap.so -> libpcap.so.0.94), plus we haven't developers on Fedora systems. LSB doesn't specifies symlinks for libraries, yet. http://klik.atekon.de/presentation/img60.html Mostly we battled different versions of libstdc++, without good results. More info: http://klik.atekon.de/wiki/index.php/ABI_insanity Kernel Module/Driver ABI insanity: Not to speak about kernel modules (drivers), which break with every nano-upgrade of one-line of Linux code. While drivers ABI isn't very stable on Windows too, you have still very high chances, that a binary driver written for Windows 2000 kernel will run on Windows XP/2003 kernels, unmodified. Those LKMs are used quite frequently inside "normal" applications by-the-way. VirtualBox, Nero ImageDrive, and Incentives Pro USB-over-IP are such examples. BTW: LSB doesn't have specs for LKMs too. I know, that those problems are nearly impossible to fix, but easing them will already help me a lot. For example, if LKM were compatible for all Linux kernel's first three numbers. That is: LKM compiled for Linux 2.6.18.0 should work on all Linux 2.6.18.x series, not break between 2.6.18.0-1 to-> 2.6.18.0-2 versions, that are downloaded via online-updates. This will be huge step forward, as it will ensure drivers compatibility at least within one specific distro. Theoretically, I have heard about kernel version "magic", but it never worked for me. -- -Alexey Eremenko "Technologov" -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
