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SubjectRe: No Distribution is 2.0.0 Current
Date
> Surely this is missing a fundamental point: we, the Debian project,
> have to ship binaries that will work on everybody's system, so that
> our users can use the kernels that they choose.

Which is missing the fundamental point that everyone else writes their stuff
to detect 1.2/2.0 by kernel headers so a build does produce the right
binaries.

> If the kernel system call interface has changed in such a way that
> binaries compiled against old kernel headers will do terrible things
> when run on new kernels, or vice versa, then surely this is (a) a
> problem with the kernel developers not thinking enough about backward
> compatibility and (b) not something we can solve by using a particular
> set of headers ?

Linux 1.2 is almost 100% BINARY compatible with 2.0. A lot of stuff is
designed to detect 2.0 kernels and build appropriately.

> A Linux distribution is a very large piece of software engineering,
> and comes is a point where expecting its maintainers to play
> `catch-up' continuously with new and sometimes-incompatible kernel
> interfaces is unreasonable.

Yes. I can see where you came from. But for network stuff because we now
support IP options and kernel recvmsg/sendmsg, BSD 4.4 unix fd passing etc
the interfaces have subtle shifts. The alternative was to stand still and
keep poorer systems.

Alan


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