On Monday 24 January 2005 23.24, Edward Peschko wrote: [ Linux interoperability in danger - libc != libc ]
Hi, [this may be just ignorance - I only use one distro (Debian), and don't try to mix binaries] Before discussing solutions: Is there a survey on how bad the problem really is? IIRC some minor API changes were done between some gcc versions, but mostly on the C++ side. I know Debian, too, ships with a quite heavily patched toolchain, but the Debian libc/binutils/gcc packagers work together with the upstream developers, and many Debian specific patches end up in the official releases sooner or later. (And most of Debian's patches concern architectures like ARM, m68k, HPPA etc., which the big distributions don't support anyway.) So, I guess, the survey would need to compare only C programs (not C++), since you explicitly are talking about libc - C++ has always been more difficult. And, it would be important to differentiate between incompatibilites caused by gcc versions from incompatibilities really caused by vendor specific modifications. cheers -- vbi P.S.: looking at Debian's libc6 glibc package (2.3.2.ds1-20): - 106 patches total Going by the name of the patch files only: - 8 hurd specific - 4 arm specific - 9 hppa specific - 4 m68k specific - 3 alpha specific - 1 amd64 specific - 1 x86 specific - 4 sparc specific - 5 mips specific - 3 ppc specific - 1 ia64 specific - 3 s390 specific - 4 correcting paths/build system only (wouldn't affect the libc API as such) - 15 locale specific (dito) So, over half of the patches will likely not affect 95% of Linux users. Of the rest, a good number clearly affect multithreaded programs only (which, admittedly, are much more widespread now than a few years back.) I didn't look at any patches at all, so I can't judge how much the patches do really change the libc. Also, I can't say how intrusive the patches of other distributions are. -- We are not loved by our friends for what we are; rather, we are loved in spite of what we are. -- Victor Hugo
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