[oi-dev] problem with firefox in hipster

[Peter Tribble]

On Fri, Jul 19, 2013 at 10:57 AM, Jim Klimov <jimklimov at cos.ru> wrote:

> On 2013-07-19 11:51, Udo Grabowski (IMK) wrote:
>
>  Maybe indeed a C++ incompatibility ?
>>>>
>>>
>  Welcome to the world of binary incompatiblitly, now the last
>> fortress has finally been conquered.....
>>
>
> Which moves me to think: would this example mean that legacy
> applications built for Solaris 10 and older, running now on
> obsolete deployments which might be targeted for upgrade to
> OI, would likely not run on newer hipster-based GCC-compiled
> OS releases?
>

That shouldn't ever happen, binary compatibility (within the
supported constraints) is a key attribute of Solarisness.
There are a number of things here:

1. It's at the application level, not the OS. It shouldn't matter
at all whether the underlying Illumos is built with gcc or studio.

2. If you introduce incompatibility, you ship the old library and
bump the version number on the new one.

3. In practice, library incompatibility (and dependency hell) is
deeply ingrained into many open source projects. Having many
dependencies in the overall stack is likely to cause problems.
(Interestingly, this means that older applications built for Solaris
9 and earlier are much safer, as they won't have pulled in any of
the much larger stack of libraries that were introduced in
Solaris 10.) This sort of breakage by changing 3rd-party
libraries is excluded from the binary compatibility guarantee.

4. My own experience with Tribblix is that everything just worked
even though Tribblix is all gcc. The actual problems I hit were when
I built everything with gcc4.7 and then updated to gcc4.8 and
things started  breaking, so I was stumbling across odd
compatibility issues there - I never distributed any of that stuff as
a result and will try another gcc4 update later once I work out
how to do later updates safely.

-- 
-Peter Tribble
http://www.petertribble.co.uk/ - http://ptribble.blogspot.com/
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://openindiana.org/pipermail/oi-dev/attachments/20130719/f654b428/attachment-0005.html>