Samba 2.2.8 vs 2.2.8a on 4.8 Release

[Kris Kennaway]

On Fri, Aug 22, 2003 at 04:52:57PM +0100, Matthew Seaman wrote:

> Ports are intended to compile and work on any supported version of the
> OS (at the moment 4.7-RELEASE, 4.8-RELEASE, 4.8-STABLE, 5.1-RELEASE,
> 5-CURRENT, although a few ports won't work on all those versions for
> various reasons) Ports will quite often compile/work on just about any
> version of the OS.

Not quite..only the most recent release (and later stable/current) is
officially supported.  It's true that in most cases you can continue
to use it successfully on older releases.

> Similarly the packages built from ports should work on any version
> with a compatible set of shared libraries, although all things being
> equal, the packages tend to work best on the suported OS versions.
> Hence packages built for 4-STABLE should work on any 4.x version since
> about 4.4-RELEASE, and packages built for recent 5.x should work on
> any 5-CURRENT or 5.x-RELEASE -- 5-CURRENT is a far more elusive target
> than 4.x at the moment, due to some fairly large scale ongoing work,
> and portability isn't necessarily up to the usual high standard.

This isn't guaranteed: in many cases (e.g. OpenSSL, ports like lsof
that depend on kernel structures, ...) packages built for later
releases cannot be run on earlier systems.  FreeBSD doesn't provide
this kind of "forwards compatibility", although it's only occasionally
broken.

Kris
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