On Sat, 25 Jun 2005, Simon Perreault wrote: > That's why RPMs are built on a per-distro basis. You usually can't > assume that an RPM compiled on FC3 will work on FC4. I tried to > explain that point to my boss at my previous job but we ended up > cross-compiling on Gentoo for Suse 9.2 and FC2 anyway. I bet they've > run into a lot of trouble and now have dedicated build machines > running the target distros.
An RPM for an older distribution should generally work on a newer version of the same distro, so your boss's expectation was right - at least it usually works on FreeBSD and Solaris, if it doesn't work on Linux, Linux must improve in this compatibility regard. If I need an RPM for several versions of the same distribution, I usually compile on the oldest available and it usually works. Notable exception being kernel modules perhaps. -- Matthias Andree
