From: Arjan de Vet (devet@adv.win.tue.nl)
Date: 04/17/93


From: devet@adv.win.tue.nl (Arjan de Vet)
Subject: Re: linux shared libraries often incompatible
Date: 17 Apr 1993 18:46:49 +0200

In article <1qovtg$khg@news.cs.tu-berlin.de> wong@cs.tu-berlin.de (Wolfgang
Jung) writes:

>Even better is a pointer to the patches from the original sources (stating
>which Source version is needed.) I never saw a conf/os/linux for the smail
>sourcetree :-(

I would suggest the following scheme. Say you port a package foo-1.00.tar.z.
You then could make a package named foo-1.00-linux.tar.z containing the
following:

 - binaries
 - a patch file (context or unified) + Linux specific config files
 - A README file, saying which version of the libraries the binaries are
   compiled with and giving instructions how to compile the package yourself
   (and that includes ungzipping/untarring, patching, putting the config
   files to the correct location, making and installing).

BTW: I ftp-ed a conf/os/linux for smail more than half a year ago from one of
the ftp sites.

>Also it might be good to have the Programs accept older lib revisions (i.E
>all compiled for libc.so.4.3.1 should also run with lib libc.so.4.3.3) or even
>better libc.so.4 build programs should be able to run with libc.so.4.3.3.

This is already the case :-) The problem was that programs compiled with,
say, libc.so.4.3.3 won't run with older versions of the libraries.

The best thing to do is to upgrade your C library regularly. Most people who
make binaries compile the binaries with the latest C library.

Arjan