Jason Moxham wrote: > On Tuesday 15 September 2009 18:37:08 Dr. David Kirkby wrote:
>> There is another issue which must be considered when building binaries. >> Building them on version 'n' of an operating system does not guaranatee >> they will work on 'n-1'. On Solaris, building on a late release of >> Solaris 10, does not guarantee the code will run on the previous release >> of Solaris 10, though it probably will in most cases. Hence platforms >> used for creating binaries should be running old versions of the OS. >> > > Yet another issue , who and what machine builds them? > >> Dave Building binaries to run on multiple systems is not easy. I know of two case where Wolfram Research screwed up Mathematica on this. 1) The binaries for 5.1 and 5.2 would run on fast machines, but peg the CPU on older hardware. Computing 1+1 would return 2, but then peg the CPU. http://groups.google.co.uk/group/sci.math.symbolic/browse_thread/thread/3614dc0ccab52f29/f2b336259469b1d4?hl=en&ie=UTF-8&q=excessive+mathematica+solaris#f2b336259469b1d4 Clearly WRI had tested MMA on newish Sun hardware, but failed to test it on older hardware. 2) The binaries for Solaris x86 would run on AMD CPUs, but not all Intel CPUs. I originally thought that was dumb of WRI to release Mathematica which was only supported on AMD and not Intel CPUs. I later found out this was not intensional. They only added the fact it was supported on AMD CPUs after it was clear it was not working on some Intel CPUs. http://groups.google.co.uk/group/sci.math.symbolic/browse_thread/thread/4a8acbd97b1edbc1/fd6a472de8696814?hl=en&ie=UTF-8&q=hack+mathematica+solaris+intel#fd6a472de8696814 It seems to me, the safest way to build binaries is to build on an old version of the OS on old hardware. Solaris has very good backward compatibility, so stuff built on old releases of Solaris will almost certainly work on newer releases - if not, Sun will fix it. I doubt Linux has that degree of compatibility. --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ To post to this group, send an email to sage-devel@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to sage-devel-unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel URL: http://www.sagemath.org -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
