FreeBSD 4.11 binary compatibility (libm.so.2, etc)

[Kris Kennaway]

On Tue, Aug 28, 2007 at 08:58:08PM -0500, Jonathan Horne wrote:
> On Tuesday 28 August 2007 17:35:55 Kris Kennaway wrote:
> > On Tue, Aug 28, 2007 at 03:31:25PM -0700, Thomas D. Dean wrote:
> > > It provides a temporary solution in some cases, when you need to get
> > > going.  It is not a long term solution.
> >
> > It's bogus because a) the real solution exists and is trivial (install
> > the relevant compat port), and b) your advice *will* break
> > applications.
> >
> > Shared library revision numbers are bumped for a good reason, of
> > course, namely because there are changes made that break backwards
> > compatibility.
> >
> > Kris
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> 
> it would be interesting to know what kinds of apps break from doing this... i 
> link 6 things to get my netbackup agent working, and so far everything works 
> like clockwork.
> 
> i remember back in tredhat fedora, i learned this behavior because i want to 
> remember, that tons of libs were always linked by default.  once i moved to 
> freebsd, i really didnt think anything of it, because i was always told that 
> these types of things were backwards compatible, and they were symlinked 
> specifically because of this (ie, it was intended by the distro provider, 
> becuase some app they included was asking for an older revision of a lib).  
> ive not looked at a linux in about 2 years, but i want to say it was so 
> common as to be "normal" to see linked libs.

It's not normal in FreeBSD.  Library versions are only changed when
there is an incompatible change that means the new library *CANNOT* be
used with certain old binaries.  While you may be able to sometimes
get away with running certain applications (or certain parts of
applications) that do not interact with the incompatible changes, it
is never a safe thing to do.

Kris