Re: Slink to potato upgrade
"Marcelo E. Magallon" <mmagallo@efis.ucr.ac.cr> writes:
> I've been following this thread with interest, and from what I've understood
> so far, if I use glibc as its _documentation_ says it should be used, I
> shouldn't have any trouble; the problems arise when I use what glibc 2.0
> _used_ to provide (but wasn't a _documented_ interface) but no longer does.
> It's bad programming practice, it's true, but it's also true that it breaks
> people's systems. And that we should avoid. That means _considering_ the
> possibility of changing the soname, but also means _not_ doing it on our own
> because that would render potato into a useless development plataform (in
> some situations you can't _afford_ to recompile everywhere, you need to
> provide compiled binaries)
Standard Unix lex produces C source code which does not compile under
glibc2.1. Probably lex should have been changed, but users should not
be unduly punished for using a standard tool. Many people have code
which uses lex. Some of that code uses lex-specific features which
are not supplied by flex. In theory, it should not be necessary to
run lex on each new platform. The C code generated on one platform is
good on all platforms.
Remember that ANSI C has not been around forever. Some of the rules
have changed over the years.
Is there a list of problems porting to glibc2.1. We should compile
such a list if it doesn't already exist. This list should be packaged
before potato becomes stable.
--
Kevin Dalley
SETI Institute
kevin@seti.org
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