packaging and binary incompatibility coming from the compiler

[Patrice Dumas]

On Tue, Apr 17, 2007 at 08:25:31PM +0200, Linus Walleij wrote:
> Include the program into Fedora if it is generally useful.

Don't worry about that, I package a lot, in Fedora or in private repos, 
but it doesn't make sense to package every code. For a personal case, 
numerical models are not to be packaged.

> Or release new binaries with each new Fedora release (.fc6 package, .fc7 
> package ...)
> 
> That's the current rationale.

Ok, but it is better if linking fails instead of having runtime issues.
I don't want to recompile for the sake of recompiling. Not to mention
that some compilation may be resource hungry.

> This is also the reason why EDA vendors and whathaveyou proprietary 
> software tie their software to RHEL (Red Hat Enterprise Linux). That 
> product has a slow release cycle and long support cycle and that's exactly 
> what someone packaging binary software wants.

You have a use case in mind which is far from the general use case of
libraries. As a side note, and unless I'm wrong on Centos 4 I get an
ICE on some of my compilations, while at some points I could run the
programs dynamically linked on fedora just fine on Centos (nowadays
time it is not possible anymore and I compile statically, but at some
point it was possible).
 
> For a mainly source-recompile-based distro like Fedora, we can break the 
> ABI with each release and also happily do so :)

Ok, but this should really be said explicitely somewhere. Maybe it is, 
but I never stumbled on it. 

Anyway Jakub proposed to use the soname to add this information, this 
seems more user-friendly to me.

--
Pat