He meant GLibC function, not syscall...

Posted Dec 1, 2010 10:57 UTC (Wed) by Yorick (guest, #19241)
In reply to: He meant GLibC function, not syscall... by khim
Parent article: The kernel and the C library as a single project

As you note, the ABI stability only goes in one direction. Someone who wishes to distribute a binary that will work on systems of varying age will have to chose between:

Building his program on a system with the oldest possible libc
Linking to libc statically
Distribute the (dynamic) libc used in the build
Keeping an old build environment somewhere and be careful not to use /usr/lib, /usr/include and so on

None of these solutions are perfect. In some ways, the Unix tradition of providing a "canonical" set of include and lib files in a prominent place, /usr, and a compiler that is configured to use these files by default, makes this harder than it would on a platform where development tools are installed separately and explicitly in a user-specified location.