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On Sunday 17 September 2006 08:41, Simon Waters wrote: > Not that GCC has many binary > incompatible upgrades, but it does happen. *cough*. GNU/Linux is the worst out of all for binary compatibility. both between versions of the same distribution and different distributions. Trying to distribute dynamic elf binaries for linux is next to impossible without creating one for each and every linux distribution and their corresponding versions, caused by all sorts of things including, but not limited to: * GCC version * glibc version * glibc configuration (nptl, ICU, etc) * kernel version * kernel configuration * any other libarary your application links against * hardware architecture * voodoo magic that you never work out looking at the list of binary curl downloads [1] always makes me chuckle for the number of linux binaries there and a single "Win32" at the bottom. even creating a generic static binary is next to impossible in linux linked with glibc, which kind of defeats the point of staticaly linking, right [2]? personally i reckon it's a conspiracy - Stallman doesn't want binary only applications, right? :-) The WIN32 API, as evil as it may be at times, is stable and supported for years and years. Arguably one of Microsoft's problems, but great for software vendors. When was the last time you had to compile something from source in windows just so it would run? ~ Theo 1 - http://curl.haxx.se/download.html 2 - there are good technical reasons for this (mainly nss), but it's still evil. -- Theo P. Zourzouvillys http://www.crazygreek.co.uk theo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx -- The Mailing List for the Devon & Cornwall LUG http://mailman.dclug.org.uk/listinfo/list FAQ: http://www.dcglug.org.uk/linux_adm/list-faq.html