Messages in this thread |  | | From | Alan Cox <> | Subject | Re: No Distribution is 2.0.0 Current | Date | Tue, 25 Jun 1996 13:22:20 +0100 (BST) |
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> 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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