[ian@airs.com: Re: forestalling GNU incompatibility - proposal for binary relative dynamic linking]

[Dan Kegel]

Edward Peschko wrote:
> "A developer is compiling a large set of applications that he doesn't
>  control, and hence may or may not be LSB compliant. He cannot expect
>  the oldest version of glibc to apply because the applications may
>  depend on newer glibc features. He does not have root, so therefore
>  cannot develop in a chroot environment.

You say "the applications *may* depend on newer glibc features" ?
You should find out for sure.  The best way to find out is to
try.  Which Linux environments do you need your apps to run in?
Which version of glibc is installed on those systems?
You're almost certain to need nothing earlier than glibc-2.2.3
(and I think you can build safely with glibc-2.2.5 and have
that work, but I'm not sure; maybe somebody else could comment).

You say the apps may or may not be LSB compliant.  Have you
tried building them under the LSB yet?

Also, note that you don't need a chroot environment to
build against a different glibc than your system.

>  Furthermore, one of the things that he is doing is migrating from an older
>  version of glibc to a newer one, and wants both the freedom of doing
>  it without trashing his environment, and not having to rebuild his programs 
>  from scratch to test versus two versions of glibc.
> "

I'm confused; are you migrating your development workstation
to a newer glibc?   If you're using cross-compilation techniques,
that shouldn't matter here.

> However, it occurs to me that the patch alone would not be enough..
> apparently the ld.so interface heeps changing, which makes it currently 
> impossible to use any system libraries unrelated to the current glibc.
> 
> My question is: why does this interface keep changing? Could it be 
> stabilized?

ld.so is part of glibc.   glibc promises that newer ld.so's can run
programs linked against older glibc's.  That's enough for most people.
- Dan

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