On Thu, Jun 19, 2003 at 09:43:23PM +0200, David Weinehall wrote: > Alternative 1: > > You, and rest of the minority who use libc5 program, can dual-boot > an older distribution of Debian (say potato) where the programs still > work. Yes, it can be a hassle, but it works.
Assuming it supports your hardware. Which it is not entirely likely to do. For instance: Many video cards require XFree 4.3.x or above. They require agpgart in the kernel. They require iwconfig and other wireless tools. There are a whole host of things that are not necessarily going to work from old distributions, and the situation is only getting worse. > Alternative 2: > > Debian can continue to drag along support for libc5-binaries (hey, > nobody out there with need for libc4?) to the end of days, with more and > more problems accumulating, and more and more baggage needed to build > them (for every new release of binutils/gcc/etc, it becomes less likely > that libc5 will work properly without serious tinkering). Why not just ship an old binutils/gcc to build the old libc5 binaries? I really don't understand why this is such a difficult problem. If, for instance, gcc 2.7.2 could build these things three years ago, why can't it now? It's not as if some fundamental kernel structures have changed in a hugely incompatible way; other binaries from that era work fine. -- John
