[M3devel] ports with versions in their names?

[Mika Nystrom]

Olaf Wagner writes:
>Quoting Jay <jay.krell at cornell.edu>:
>
>>
>> These platforms..NetBSD2i386, FreeBSD4..in particular
>> because they identify old versions, should we just
>> pretend they are "I386_NETBSD" and "I386_FREEBSD"?
>>
>> Introduce new platforms with those names?
>
>The names seem OK; if you want to rename, this will of course
>cause some trouble, but I wouldn't object. Perhaps adding
>them and then slowly phasing out the old platforms will work
>best.
>
>> Current FreeBSD is 7.1, though I know 4.0 might be
>> more popular than it sounds.
>
>FreeBSD 4 perhaps still has its users, as has FreeBSD6 (am still
>running that myself).
>We'll need to provide different binary archives for those platforms
>then (further differentiation in archive names is needed).
>
>> There is not likely anything any longer version specific
>> in the source to these ports, and possibly not even in the binaries.
>
>I'd doubt that. At least FreeBSD has always changed its APIs and even
>ABIs between major releases. Recompilation of C sources _will_ be
>needed.
>

Hi M3ers,

As I think I've mentioned before, FreeBSD tends to be very well
backward-compatible.  If you have compat libraries installed that
is.  What this means is that you can take an old compiler binary
and generate code that will run on the newer system.  You cannot
go backwards!  So while you might be able to install SRC M3 for
FreeBSD2 on a new system, you can't expect a FreeBSD7 binary dist
to work even on a FreeBSD 6.x system.  This is very different from
the situation on Linux where things to break somewhat gradually in
both directions.

I still run at least one machine that's 4.11 and I use the exact
same compiler binaries on 5.5.

I'd be happy to volunteer to put together a binary distribution
for FreeBSD4 when there's a new release of CM3.

    Mika

P.S. of course my comments apply only to a single architecture.
You can't go from FreeBSD2 on i386 to FreeBSD6 on amd64, I don't
think.