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Binary compatibility is a myth

Posted Aug 4, 2011 9:28 UTC (Thu) by NAR (subscriber, #1313)
Parent article: Getting a better Glimpse at unstable applications

To test them out, I would need to procure older, not newer, copies of a bunch of system libraries.

So we can conclude that binary compatibility on Linux is a myth?

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Binary compatibility is a myth ?

Posted Aug 4, 2011 10:30 UTC (Thu) by Fats (subscriber, #14882) [Link]

Yes and no, some years ago the switch of threading has caused a lot of programs to fail running without a recompile. From then on it is most of the time enough to install legacy/compatibility versions of a library to get a program running. e.g. install version .so.(n-1) of a library when version for current version of distro is .so.n

greets,
Staf.

Binary compatibility is a myth

Posted Aug 4, 2011 19:28 UTC (Thu) by iabervon (subscriber, #722) [Link]

Don't blame Linux for that-- it's all userspace's fault. And some distros actually do a remarkable job of it; I remember using Skype binaries that needed a different libc version with a different C++ ABI, and Gentoo happily pulled in the additional libraries through the package manager and it just worked. But there was definitely no way it was going to run using the same system library files that other packages were using; it wouldn't even try to, since the sonames were different.