Re: Proposal: removing libc5, altgcc and all their old-days dependencies
On Thu, Jun 19, 2003 at 09:43:23PM +0200, David Weinehall wrote:
> Alternative 1:
>
> You, and rest of the minority who use libc5 program, can dual-boot
> an older distribution of Debian (say potato) where the programs still
> work. Yes, it can be a hassle, but it works.
Assuming it supports your hardware. Which it is not entirely likely to do.
For instance:
Many video cards require XFree 4.3.x or above. They require agpgart in the
kernel. They require iwconfig and other wireless tools. There are a whole
host of things that are not necessarily going to work from old
distributions, and the situation is only getting worse.
> Alternative 2:
>
> Debian can continue to drag along support for libc5-binaries (hey,
> nobody out there with need for libc4?) to the end of days, with more and
> more problems accumulating, and more and more baggage needed to build
> them (for every new release of binutils/gcc/etc, it becomes less likely
> that libc5 will work properly without serious tinkering).
Why not just ship an old binutils/gcc to build the old libc5 binaries?
I really don't understand why this is such a difficult problem. If, for
instance, gcc 2.7.2 could build these things three years ago, why can't it
now? It's not as if some fundamental kernel structures have changed in a
hugely incompatible way; other binaries from that era work fine.
-- John
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