On Fri, 19 Feb 2021 at 16:08, Warner Losh <i...@bsdimp.com> wrote: > FreeBSD builds packages on the oldest supported version in the stable branch. > Due to forward compatibility, that means all supported versions of FreeBSD > 12.x will work. Recently, FreeBSD 12.1 became unsupported, so the build > machines clicked forward to 12.2. Since there's no 'forward compatibility' > guarantees, this problem was hit. While you can run binaries compiled on old > versions of the software on new versions of the system, you can't necessarily > do the inverse because new symbols are introduced (in this case close_range).
It makes perfect sense that you don't want to support older versions forever and that at some point newer packages aren't valid on old systems, but I don't understand why an older 12.1 system then says "but I'm going to go ahead and install these won't-work packages anyway" rather than "oh dear, I'm out of support, there are no newer packages available, I will install whatever the last archived version of the package for my OS version is" (or "I will install nothing"). I'm surprised this doesn't break a lot of real-world users... -- PMM
