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Re:Single binary executable packages by marcosdumay on Wednesday March 02, 2022 @07:40PM (#30535588)
> Do you mean they try to avoid breaking ABI in a forwards compatible way?

Ok, I can see what I have written that could read this way, but the context is completely about backward compatibility. Forward compatibility isn't a concept that appears often in software.

Re:Single binary executable packages by BeeOnRope on Wednesday March 02, 2022 @08:16PM (#30535871)
It's not about how you wrote it, it's that the "single executable" concept needs both directions of compatibility if you dynamically link libc on any old distro.

E.g., you might use a relatively recent distro in your GitHub action (or whatever) to build this binary, but then anyone running CentOS or whatever can't run it because they ship an older libc version and required symbols aren't available.

Re:Single binary executable packages by marcosdumay on Thursday March 03, 2022 @08:16AM (#30540538)
If libc is backwards compatible, you immediately have a compatibility matrix that says where your code will run. Quite like you have for any kind of release on any environment.

You seem to want some way to have your code run on any platform whatever features you use in it. That you can't have. Of course if you want to support CentOS 6, you have to avoid any new symbol.

Re:Single binary executable packages by BeeOnRope on Thursday March 03, 2022 @09:58AM (#30541843)
The problem isn't new symbols, it's that existing symbols can get the new version depending on what version you compile it against. On my glibc ~200 symbols have the newest version (2.34) but these are largely all methods that have been around forever. A binary built here won't run in most places.