On Tue, 29 Aug 2000, Russ Allbery wrote:
> Not a big deal, and that's certainly doable. But it's possible to do more
> than that if you really want to. The glibc folks have decided to comment
> to nearly full binary compatibility for essentially forever; the theory is
> that upgrading libc should never break a working application even if the
> ABI changes. I'm not familiar with the exact details of how symbol
> versioning works, but as I understand it, this is what it lets you do.
I'm sure the glibc folks indeed work very hard at this and are largely
successful. I also know, however, that over the past couple of years or
so, I've had to recompile nearly all of my applications on several
occasions when I've upgraded glibc. Other times, glibc upgrades have gone
without a hitch. It's probably my fault and probably somewhere deep in my
personal library I'm incorrectly fiddling with stdio internals or
something, but I just wanted to offer a counter data point that doing
this sort of this robustly is, indeed, very hard.
--
Andy Dougherty [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Dept. of Physics
Lafayette College, Easton PA 18042
