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.
--
Michel Fortin
[email protected]
http://michelf.com/
