On Sat, 14 Feb 2004, David Z Maze wrote: > Abdul Latip <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: >> Once in a while, users are asking me about the compatibilty problem of >> Linux. They reasoning that M$Office can be installed anywhere like >> Win98, WinME, WinNT, et. al. Whereas it is hard to install a >> RedHat package into Debian, and so on. > ...and it's hard to install Office on Red Hat, or a Debian package on > WinXP. This isn't surprising. :-) The closer analogy is that it's > almost as easy to install a Debian package on Debian potato, woody, > sarge, etc.
Apology for my poor english. It was not my intention to compare Linux with M$. >> AFAIK, CMIIW, this is related with the compiler version, the glibc >> version, the kernel version, and the kernel configuration and >> modules. May I know what exactly the Linux compability problem >> is ? I.E.: It seems they are not so backward compatible? > "What are you really trying to do?" Thank you for the question! My intention is to understand myself what the problem is, so that I can answer questions from the users. Qouted from a "README.linux" file: [...] Linux is the most self incompatible OS I know. [...] Libc.so.6 is definitely a big problem in binary compatibility. [...] The dynamic linker on Linux does not work correctly. > There are some compatibility > issues, which mostly break into three parts: (1) it's hard to use > newer software against older versions of the C library; (2) other > libraries might have changed interfaces, so you need a newer or older > version; (3) a small amount of software depends on particular kernel > versions. Within Debian, (1) and (2) are dealt with by dpkg's > dependency system. If you want to install software that's only > available as RPMs (which IME is pretty rare), you can use 'alien' to > convert to a Debian package. Debian specific question: If backports exist/ is possible; than why is not a new version of package be compiled with older libs/dependencies version? Thank you for clues... -- Abdul Latip - Junior Staff - http://people.WebIndonesia.com/dullatip/ - - Dear IETF: I want back my X.400 under X.25 or CLNP spam free mailer! - -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
