Debian Etch and Ubuntu Feisty: a comparison

Posted Aug 12, 2009 14:56 UTC (Wed) by drag (guest, #31333)
In reply to: Debian Etch and Ubuntu Feisty: a comparison by mbanck
Parent article: Debian Etch and Ubuntu Feisty: a comparison

> Remember that Ubuntu is only based on Debian (unstable, by the way) on the source-package level. They rebuild revery package against their own toolchain, which in general makes it unsuitable to be installed on a Debian system (and vice-versa).

I don't know how much truth is in that really. In what ways are the code generated by the toolchains incompatible?

For example I've installed Chrome and a few other programs from Ubuntu's PPA on Debian and that worked just fine.

I know that for Opera offers dozens and dozens different packages for different distros.... but if you look at what is in them they all use the same binaries and install the same libraries to the same locations. Checksums and everything matches. There are a only a few different files, mostly minor things to do with packaging and the only different binary that is supplied is one for very old versions of Ubuntu that have use a different GCC C++ ABI.

Is it really neccessary for every program to be built using the same exact versions of GCC and whatnot?