Linux question

[Fairlight]

>From inside the gravity well of a singularity, Jay Ashworth shouted:
> 
> Is there any chance -- any chance at all, Ken -- that you could recap
> precisely what it was that caused the problem, so that those who wish to
> evaluate the practicality of deploying on other distributions can
> figure out for themselves what is likely to work, and what is not?

I can, I think.  It just snapped into my head why it happened at RH9.

That's when they back-ported NPTL and the API/ABI changes into the kernel,
and a few other things changed with libraries.  Static linking became
"non-static" in the sense that a statically linked program was calling on
another function that was in one of the newer libraries (I want to say
nsswitch, and I'm pretty sure I'm right--I think Ryan could confirm or
correct that).  The whole "static does not mean static, exactly," thing was
a bit annoying.

The fix they came up with was to go with dynamic linking.  That's when
people who had never bothered to install libtermcap got a rude awakening,
as that's one library that fP depends on, and that's the period during
which it became dynamically linked on linux.

It's going to be relevant to anyone that runs a later system that has NPTL
rolled in as a back-port to 2.4, and especially when people migrate to
systems running 2.6, which is where it was -really- rolled in officially as
far as stable trees go (it was obviously in late 2.5 development kernels).

As people migrate to 2.6-based systems, they'll need to move to 5.0.13, and
they'll also need to make sure they install libtermcap.

mark->
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