Date: Sun, 21 Mar 1999 08:18:22 -0700
From: Erik Ratcliffe <erik@calderasystems.com>
To: caldera-users@rim.caldera.com
Subject: Re: New COL 2.X

On Fri, Mar 19, 1999 at 10:49:01PM +0000, Juan A. Abellon, M.D. wrote:
> 1) Will there be an upgrade script, even considering the new libs ?

Although this idea has been tossed around, I would have to say off the top
of my head that there won't be one.  That's not the official word, but it's
my personal guess.


> 2) If so, is it worth to go that route or better to reinstall anew ?

With an upgrade this drastic (all you'd be doing is saving /home directories
and some configurations under /etc and /usr/lib or /usr/local, then wiping
out everything else on your system), anything other than a re-install would
be a waste of time.  Any upgrade script that we'd provide would scan your
entire system for an hour or so, then it would wipe everything out anyway
and give you an entirely new system.  Once you've moved to glibc the upgrade
scripts should be doable again, but you're literally replacing almost 100%
of your system moving up to glibc, so upgrade scripts are nothing more than
time wasters.


> 3) Are the new Glibc libs backward compatible, i.e.: SO 4.3 ?

Unfortunately, glibc 2.1 isn't very backward compatible.  There are forked
versions of glibc that lots of software has been ported to in the interim
while waiting for 2.1 to come out, and if I gather correctly from Donnie
Barnes, the changes that SHOULD have been incorporated into the new version
of glibc for whatever reason didn't make it in, so now we may have some
compatibility problems.  I could have that wrong, but if I do I'm sure
someone will chime in and correct me. :)

The new glibc has symbol versioning features within it that will make
*future* versions of glibc more backward compatible with version 2.1,
though, so if we can just "start over" to an extent with version 2.1, future
versions of glibc will be much easier to work with compatibility-wise.

SO 4.3 isn't glibc, though; it's libc5, and OpenLinux 2.2 will be shipping
with a full libc5 compatibility system that will let you drop in libc5
software and run it as if you're on a libc5 system.  It's all transparent;
no wrappers or LD_LIBRARY_PATH stuff required.

-- 
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