On Sunday, November 14, 2010 06:29:21 am Sawrub wrote: > On 11/14/2010 04:07 PM, Michael Schwendt wrote: > > On Sun, 14 Nov 2010 15:51:44 +0530, Sawrub wrote: > >> all i wanted was to know that why are they included in the > >> results for a different version of OS. > > Because [hopefully] they continue to work and [hopefully] the package > > maintainer has verified that they still work without a rebuild. > > > Or may be the maintainer is no longer interested in re-building. Then they would be in the orphans list, and they would eventually be dropped if a new maintainer didn't step up to the plate. At least that's my reading of the packaging guidelines; Michael is free to correct me, as he's been more closely involved over the years. If a package from, say, Red Hat Linux 5.2 (not RHEL5, but old-school RHL) were to run unmodified directly on F14 (don't know any that do, but 5.2 is the oldest dist I still have running in a production setting (not connected to the Internet!)) then why would a rebuild be needed? Ten years ago I was contracted by a company to build RPM's of PostgreSQL 7 for a number of different distributions. I was pleasantly surprised at how portable (to a degree) packages for different distribution versions were... even packages for a whole different distribution can be made portable, to a degree, as long as package names (for dependencies) are the same, and the versions are fairly close for most required packages. Essentially, I could take pains to make the dependencies as generic as possible, and I could install one distribution's package directly on another. Now, since I was being paid to do this, I did do native builds for all the supported distributions; but for testing it was fun to cross-install packages. And I know of several commercial packages that are portable in this way. VMware Workstation, when it was still distributed as RPM, was like this. CodeWeavers' CrossOver is still distributed in a distribution-independent RPM. The Fluendo DVD player, Media Center, and codec packs are distributed in distribution-independent RPM's. And there are other examples. So, as Michael said, don't read too much into dist tags; they're there only as a hint, not as a hard dependency. -- users mailing list users@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx To unsubscribe or change subscription options: https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/users Guidelines: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Mailing_list_guidelines
