Re: Oldstable? Abandoned Packages? Alternatives?
Thomas H. George wrote:
> An academic question: If I wrote a standalone program in C strictly for
> my own use what would be its lifetime? I have heard it argued that C
> (and I assume gcc) is here forever as it is the preferred language for
> writing operating systems.
If you wrote a program using only C and the standard C library
functions, the binary will work for probably many years (depending on
how long it is until any transition from libc6 to libc7), and the source
code will probably compile for decades (if appropriate arguments for
backwards compatibility are given to the compiler).
However, almost any program needs to be linked against some additional
libraries for using graphics, etc, unless you want to write _everything_
from scratch. So really the binary (source code) will work only until
one of the libraries it needs changes ABI (API, respectively), and the
old version of the library is no longer available for Debian and can't
be installed. This is probably on the order of a few years.
Hope this answers your question,
--
Kevin B. McCarty <kmccarty@princeton.edu> Physics Department
WWW: http://www.princeton.edu/~kmccarty/ Princeton University
GPG: public key ID 4F83C751 Princeton, NJ 08544
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