On Tue, 2009-02-10 at 15:38 -0500, Patrick Finnegan wrote:
> Yes, it's unfortunate that RH decided to do it the "stupid" way, which
> keeps the system from being 99% backwards compatible with 32-bit
> programs; who really needs a 64-bit address space version of 'ls'
> anyways?
>
> This is one of my reasons that I prefer Debian - all the basic system
> libraries are compiled for both 32 and 64 bit, and the number of 64-bit
> libraries keep expanding... at least with Linux/OSS you can compile the
> needed 64-bit libraries yourself, unlike the proprietary bits in UNIX.
> Now if just everyone else would follow suit, and switch to doing things
> the more sane way, I'd be just a little bit happier. :)
>
The problem I have is that its a pain to support various releases of
Linux. You can always compile code on RHEL3 and have it run most
everywhere. You can't compile for RHEL5 and run it on an older version
of Linux. So in general, I push the RHEL3 versions of my programs.
The problem is shared library support. I've found support for legacy
shared libraries to be pretty strong in the 32 bit world but not in the
64 bit world. So I'm running into some problems trying to get older 32
bit applications to run on current 64 bit platforms. So now, I'm
looking more towards supporting 64 bit directly in order to make sure I
don't have to jump through hoops to get the applications to run.
________________________________________________________________________
Daniel Vietor
Mail: devo@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Unisys Corp
Title: Engineer/Meteorologist
2476 Swedesford Rd
Phone: 610-648-3623
Malvern PA 19355
Fax: 610-695-5524
