Upgrading to 7.0 - stupid requirements

[Bakul Shah]

On Fri, 29 Feb 2008 00:54:55 +0100 Kris Kennaway <kris at FreeBSD.org>  wrote:
> portupgrade -faP requests to reinstall everything from precompiled 
> packages.  It will only fall back to compiling them locally if the 
> package is unavailable (e.g. for legal reasons).
> 
> Second, the reason for this requirement is explained in the 
> announcement.  In fact, it has *always* been required to recompile ports 
> when moving to a new major release of FreeBSD, for guaranteed correct 
> operation when some of the ports are updated later on.

Er... Can't one run old binaries after installing one or more
of usr/ports/misc/compat-[3456]x -- that has not changed, has
it?

I agree that people *should* recompile but it is not always
possible or convenient and in such cases the compat libraries
are a good crutch. In face one strong point of freebsd has
been (or was) backward compatibility.

> This is not FreeBSD-specific advice.  It is true on any operating system 
> when the underlying set of libraries changes in an incompatible way. 
> However, on FreeBSD this *only* happens betweeen version branches.

Almost all commercial OSes provide some degree of backward
compatibility; some do much better (such as IBM & SGI).