Compiling 4-RELEASE on 5-STABLE

[Erik Trulsson]

On Thu, Oct 14, 2004 at 12:31:33PM +0530, Subhro wrote:
> On Thu, 14 Oct 2004 01:18:25 -0400 (EDT), John Gillis <zefram at zefram.net> wrote:
> >however.. there are still things that could go wrong and I
> > prefer not to find out when a production server heads south or doesn't
> > have the right firmware on the RAID card.. so that's why I lag.
> 
> You can very well lag but doing so you would be creating apain in your
> forehead. Because everything that worked on 4.X-Release ( repeat,
> notice the word release) will also work on 5.Y-Release ( notice the
> word release).

If you actually believe that I have a very nice bridge here you might
be interested in.  It is certainly the goal that things which worked on
4.x will continue to work in 5.x, and it might even work out that way
in 99.99% of all cases, but *everything*? Not a bloody chance - there
are always bugs that have yet to fixed (or even discovered).


> >        Also, at least one piece of hardware is near impossible to
> > upgrade. An old 486/25 that's running Snort, without a cd-rom and a 200M
> > hard drive.
> 
> Negative, this hardware is also upgradable.

Depends. It it is a 486sx it will not run 5.x  (support for FPU-less
systems has been removed.) I believe 5.x also needs a bit more memory
than 4.x, so if that box has too little RAM it might be unbearably slow
under 5.x

> 
> >        What about my question about boot strapping? Does that ensure that
> > I could compile the world/kernel of 4.x on 5.3?
> >                John
> No it does not. To be precise as far as I know, there is no way you
> can compile a native 4.X binary of any kind (application, kernel,
> bootstrap, you name it) on a 5.X box.

And that is bullshit. It is of course possible to compile a 4.x binary
on a 5.x box - just make sure you link against the right libraries (and
in the case of C++ programs at least, compile with a compatible
compiler.)  I don't know if it is possible to do this without jumping
through an inordinate number of hoops however.




-- 
<Insert your favourite quote here.>
Erik Trulsson
ertr1013 at student.uu.se