[COLUG] Binary Compatibility - was Open Solaris and the Borg

[Jim Wildman]

On Wed, 1 Nov 2006, Stephen Potter wrote:

> I have 8000 Solaris servers running thousands of applications.  Imagine
> how much effort it would take to go through all of those servers and
> recompile the binary, test it, port the changes that someone made on a
> whim without any engineering thought, recompile (again), test (again), and
> redeploy.
> 

This is an internal management issue that is being 'enabled' by Sun's
policy.  It's just as bad as the emotional/relational kind.

Well, if Sun wasn't doing all this 'good' by maintaining a lengthy tail,
maybe some of those folks would get onto modern versions and _decrease_
the support effort.

> I don't expect binary compatibility to be maintained if the major
> underlying architecture is changed.  But, Apple provides service to its
> clients by easing the change from one architecture to another.  This saves
> their clients real time and real money not having to go through the
> process I outlined above.  Why shouldn't that be possible from one fairly
> minor kernel version to another?
> 
> -spp
> 

I find more and more open source applications 'just working' on various 
versions of Linux.  Also more and more are providing .deb, .rpm automatically.
Apparently (as Russ pointed out) folks are getting the autobuilding
pretty well knocked.  

As you know, proprietary apps are a whole nother beast.  But that is
because they insist on reinventing wheels (poorly).

------------------------------------------------------------------------
Jim Wildman, CISSP, RHCE       jim at rossberry.com http://www.rossberry.com
"Society in every state is a blessing, but Government, even in its best
state, is a necessary evil; in its worst state, an intolerable one."
Thomas Paine