[Pkg-grass-general] Re: GIS packages for Ubuntu

[Petter Reinholdtsen <pere@hungry.com>]

[Francesco Paolo Lovergine]
> Source level compatibility is possible (roughly speaking).  Of
> course, ubuntu is essentially a fork of debian and has major
> differences for library levels and binary compatibility. It's simply
> non-debian and you need to build within a suitable chroot to retain
> compatibility.

I do not quite understand why this is such a problem.  If the
libraries are backward compatible and keep the old ABI unchanged, it
should be possible to use newer libraries with old binaries or older
binaries with newer libraries, as long as the binaries and libraries
are compatible.  Why isn't this the case?

It would be nice to know more about the kind of problems experienced
when trying to use Debian packages in Ubuntu.  I suspect it should be
possible to maintain the source packages together, and then upload
them separately into debian and ubuntu.  Anyone know why this should
not work/