On Mon, Apr 07, 2003 at 11:25:34AM -0700, Jesse Keating wrote: > > Seeing as how it's binary incompatible w/ 8.0, yes Shrike is a real "9" > release. Dunno if thats what you meant by "Real" but *shrug*. I see many people saying that Red Hat Linux isn't binary compatible with previous versions. That is, that applications which worked on Red Hat Linux 8.0 will not work on Red Hat Linux 9. Binary compatibility is normally not a black and white issue. We've never had a release on IA32 platforms that totally breaks all applications which worked on previous releases. We go to great lengths to provide compatibility libraries when interfaces change, and workarounds for interfaces which can't be provided this way. Generally, applications which worked on Red Hat Linux 8.0 will function without any problems on Red Hat Linux 9. There are some applications which will not work properly because they made invalid assumptions about the behavior of POSIX threads on Linux, or had specific workarounds for known-broken threads behavior in the old LinuxThreads implementation. Because there are some applications which may break, we provide workarounds which one can use to revert to the old behavior for broken applications. The important thing about Red Hat Linux 9 isn't just that it has a great new Native POSIX Thread Library, it's that we're incorporating new technology when it has been proven to be stable and ready every release. In the past we would wait for a ".0" release to incorporate new technology. This doesn't mean that there will always be compatibility bumps in certain applications, it just means that we won't be tied to a particular major version of a subsystem for three or so releases. You can expect Red Hat to make every effort to keep existing applications working as we accelerate the integration of the latest stable Open Source projects. Cheers, Matt msw@xxxxxxxxxx -- Matt Wilson Manager, Base Operating Systems Red Hat, Inc.
