Differences between distros in different architectures

[Andrew Pollock <andrew@andrew.net.au>]

Hi,

Is it normal for the same distro (in this case, woody) on different
architectures (in this case, i386 and SPARC) to be different?

I got caught out rather severely today when I installed the sendmail
package from woody on a SPARC box, and then on an i386 box.

On the SPARC box, sendmail 8.11.3+8.12.0.Beta7-3 is linked against
Berkeley DB version 2.

iaamail:/usr/lib/cgi-bin/vmail# ldd /usr/lib/sendmail
        libdb2.so.2 => /lib/libdb2.so.2 (0x7002c000)
        libnsl.so.1 => /lib/libnsl.so.1 (0x7008a000)
        libldap.so.2 => /usr/lib/libldap.so.2 (0x700b0000)
        liblber.so.2 => /usr/lib/liblber.so.2 (0x700ea000)
        libresolv.so.2 => /lib/libresolv.so.2 (0x70106000)
        libwrap.so.0 => /lib/libwrap.so.0 (0x70128000)
        libsasl.so.7 => /usr/lib/libsasl.so.7 (0x70140000)
        libc.so.6 => /lib/libc.so.6 (0x7015c000)
        libdl.so.2 => /lib/libdl.so.2 (0x70292000)
        libcrypt.so.1 => /lib/libcrypt.so.1 (0x702a6000)
        libpam.so.0 => /lib/libpam.so.0 (0x702e4000)
        /lib/ld-linux.so.2 => /lib/ld-linux.so.2 (0x70000000)

On the i386 box, sendmail 8.11.3+8.12.0.Beta7-3 is linked against
BerkeleyDB version 3 also, and includes the libdb3 package as a
dependency, which forces a few other bits and pieces to get upgraded as
well.

apollock@daedalus:~$ ldd /usr/lib/sendmail
        libdb3.so.3 => /usr/lib/libdb3.so.3 (0x4001c000)
        libnsl.so.1 => /lib/libnsl.so.1 (0x400c8000)
        libldap.so.2 => /usr/lib/libldap.so.2 (0x400dd000)
        liblber.so.2 => /usr/lib/liblber.so.2 (0x40103000)
        libresolv.so.2 => /lib/libresolv.so.2 (0x4010d000)
        libwrap.so.0 => /lib/libwrap.so.0 (0x4011f000)
        libsasl.so.7 => /usr/lib/libsasl.so.7 (0x40126000)
        libc.so.6 => /lib/libc.so.6 (0x40131000)
        libdb2.so.2 => /lib/libdb2.so.2 (0x40244000)
        libdl.so.2 => /lib/libdl.so.2 (0x40285000)
        libcrypt.so.1 => /lib/libcrypt.so.1 (0x40289000)
        libpam.so.0 => /lib/libpam.so.0 (0x402b7000)
        /lib/ld-linux.so.2 => /lib/ld-linux.so.2 (0x40000000)

So I got very caught out when I installed sendmail from testing on the
i386 box (after installing it on the SPARC box), it blew away
libdb2-dev and I think it was the Perl BerkeleyDB module that I compiled
myself broke.

Just wondering if the mistake was mine in assuming equilibrium between
same package versions in the same distribution versions on different
architectures.

Andrew