embarrassing question

[bscott at ntisys.com]

On Fri, 19 Dec 2003, at 8:37pm, jfreeman at threeofus.com wrote:
> believe it or not, my friend Dick Morrell of Smoothwall fame pointed me to 
> this fantastic site that maintains rpms for end-of-lifed RH distros (like 
> 6.2) so I've upgraded most of my apps... 

  Could you provide the name and address of the site?  :)

> so.. the question now... will a break everything if I now try to run all 
> those apps on the new 2.6 kernel?

  The answer is, as usual, more complex then "yes" or "no".

  First of all, some apps are more independent of the host platform then
others.  For example, any user application that makes use of an interpreter
(Perl, Python, Java, etc.) is likely not going to care what operating
system, let alone what kernel revision, you are running.

  Anything designed to talk directly to the kernel is likely going to need
to be upgraded -- but you could prolly guess that yourself.  For example,
the "modutils" and "util-linux" packages are highly kernel-specific.  
Things like XFree, which do a lot of low-level hardware communications, also
tend to be effected by kernel changes.

  When it comes to application software like, say, AbiWord or Gnumeric,
things get a bit more vague.  They likely don't care what release of the
kernel you are running.  However, they were also likely compiled to use
shared libraries.  That includes the main system libraries, somewhat
misleadingly called the "GNU C library", or "glibc" [1].  Binary
compatibility being what it is [2], you typically need to recompile your
applications if you change the C library.  And you will find you frequently
need to upgrade -- or at the very least recompile -- the C library for a 
major kernel revision.

  The documentation provided with the 2.6 kernel should give you some idea
of what minimum software revisions are needed.

Footnotes
---------

[1] I say "misleadingly" because they contain a great deal more then just
    the ANSI C standard library, and because they are important to programs
    written in just about any language, not just C.

[2] Binary compatibility is difficult at best, and often impossible in
    the real world.

-- 
Ben Scott <bscott at ntisys.com>
| The opinions expressed in this message are those of the author and do  |
| not represent the views or policy of any other person or organization. |
| All information is provided without warranty of any kind.              |