old ports/packages

[Matthew Seaman]

On 2016/06/04 16:14, William A. Mahaffey III wrote:
> One point of order if I may: It was stated earlier in the thread that
> binary compatibility throughout a major release cycle (X.n-R, as 'n'
> varies) is a specification. That is not explicitly addressed in the
> above URL's, as far as I can see. Is that indeed considered a
> specification ? If so, it would seem to satisfy the LTS desire
> implicitly. TIA & have a good one.

At the moment we have a guarantee of binary compatibility for any
software compiled on release X.n to be able to run on any release X.m
where m >= n.  This is not going to change with the new support model.

ie. Something compiled for 11.0 will run on any subsequent 11.x release,
but something compiled on 11.3 (say) would not necessarily run on 11.2.
 Now, in fact, that sort of backwards compatibility usually does work,
but it isn't guaranteed.  Putting in this sort of backwards incompatible
change is something that is avoided unless there is some very good
reason to introduce it.

Also recognize that libc.so in 11.x will support ABI multi-versions --
so you can run anything that needs an earlier ABI version without any
special configuration[*].  This does not apply to all of the shlibs
provided by the system, so you may get mixed results depending on what
your applications link against.

This is why the FreeBSD packages are always built on the earliest still
supported release from the same major branch.  The difference implied by
the new support model is that the package building machines would be
updated more frequently as they track the earliest still-supported
release.  Practically speaking, as a pkg user you're unlikely to
experience any difficulties even if you aren't up to date with your OS
patching, but there may be some rare occasions where you will need to
update your OS before you can update your ports.

	Cheers,

	Matthew

[*] IIRC the available version history goes back to 10.0-RELEASE; you'll
definitely need compat libs for anything compiled earlier than that, but
you may well be able to run 10.x applications on an 11.x system with no
compatibility shims required.

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