71–80 of 136 posts
It's great that Linus is committed to supporting old binaries, too bad all that effort is in vain because of the glibc disaster. Linux can run statically compiled binaries from 1993, but not the Firefox binaries from 2006.
the full context of the quote provoking Linus's rant is extremely relevant here: The current counting that we do gives the wrong numbers, in the edge cases. To my knowledge a deleted sysfs directory has never returned nlink == 0. Keeping compatibility is easy enough that it looks like it is worth doing, but maintaining 30+ years of backwards compatibility is what nlink >1 in unix filesystem directories is. I don't se…
> Programs exist for their users While this may be inferred from this discussion, this is not what Linus said in this thread. He actually said: > The *only* reason for an OS kernel existing in the > first place is to serve user-space. This is a much narrower definition without the philosophical implications of the title. Sometimes programs don't exist for their users. Take DRM for example - it is explicitly against t…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> not for the whole eco-system, but that's what stable distros are for The problem is that no app dev targets stable distros, but always goes for the latest and greatest from the upstream so distros are constantly forced to update libs and change the base system. So with a stable distro, you cant get a new version of an app, because the libs of your distro are too old, and you need to upgrade the whole distro just to…
The Linux ecosystem needs one distro (say Ubuntu) to become so influential, that app devs start to primarily target it instead of the upstream. Only then will the library space stop being a moving target for end users, and only then it will be possible to upgrade app1 without triggering an automatic update of app2, which both happen to depend on the same lib. Only then will these useless practices of "packaging" and…
In contrast, here is a thread about Debian, after much deliberation, unanimously choosing to break kernel ABI compatibility with VMware. They didn't want to increase the ABI number during a "freeze", even though they broke the ABI. http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=607368
In my experience binary compatibility on linux is a train wreck. Ever tried to get a binary compiled 5 years ago to run on a fresh install of linux? Good luck. If you still have the specific version of every shared library that it loaded you might be able to get it to work. This isn't the fault of the kernel team though. It is probably to be expected on platforms in which distributing source code is the default optio…
What program from five years ago fails to run on debian/stable?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The Linux ecosystem needs one distro (say Ubuntu) to become so influential, that app devs start to primarily target it instead of the upstream. Only then will the library space stop being a moving target for end users, and only then it will be possible to upgrade app1 without triggering an automatic update of app2, which both happen to depend on the same lib. Only then will these useless practices of "packaging" and…
I would rather ship an extra copy of all of the libraries than tell the user that he has to update libc6 (and therefor almost all of the other software he uses) to run my software.
It's just not commonly done (with exceptions like http://sta.li/), and as a user, I'm thankful for that.
An easy way to read the whole thread: http://markmail.org/thread/wwi2aynfiliqanil I don't understand why Mark Mail doesn't get more love. I wish they had better SEO or something, it's so much easier to read a long thread on their site then most mailing list archives.