At Fri, 14 May 2004 22:15:12 +0100, Niall Douglas wrote:
On 14 May 2004 at 21:44, BenoƮt Sibaud wrote:
Are we talking about the same system here? I can run my Win95 and often my DOS binaries unmodified on the latest Windows. A Linux binary from 1996 stands *zero* *chance* of running unmodified on the latest Linux.
Just for fun, on a Debian Sid [snip]
Well you're not exactly comparing apples with apples here. Many command line programs are simple enough that a FreeBSD built binary runs on Linux fine because it uses nothing more than the basic POSIX API (despite different clib's) which is of course identical on both as both are compiled with GCC.
Totally wrong. You're talking about APIs, but compiled programs use ABIs, which is a different thing. And no, the ABIs between the FreeBSD C library and the GNU one are very different.
Your typical 1996 Windows binary would contain a good portion of GUI code and possibly some MFC or COM eg; WordPad. Let's leave out the MFC and COM and assume it's a pure Win32 API application as that's roughly equivalent to X11 - say Notepad.
If you can find me an X11 binary from 1996 than runs unmodified on a modern installation without using some legacy binary compatibility package then I'll gladly retract my assertion.
Your assertion "A Linux binary from 1996 stands *zero* *chance* of running unmodified on the latest Linux" is proven wrong.
And IMHO binary compatibility isn't really important. Source compatibility is a lot more important, because you can just recompile the program you have.
Jeroen Dekkers