Using dmd on older machines

[Denis Koroskin]

On Wed, 11 Mar 2009 15:14:44 +0300, Tomas Lindquist Olsen <tomas.l.olsen at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Wed, Mar 11, 2009 at 12:56 PM, Michel Fortin
> <michel.fortin at michelf.com> wrote:
>> On 2009-03-11 04:50:37 -0400, Walter Bright <newshound1 at digitalmars.com>
>> said:
>>
>>> The source works just fine. The binaries don't. The new lib distros  
>>> don't
>>> include the old lib, and vice versa. Often the missing lib isn't  
>>> available.
>>> It's an ongoing nuisance.
>>>
>>> It isn't like Windows, where the basic api's have been unchanged for
>>> nearly 20 years.
>>>
>>> Mac OSX is the worst of the lot, there you get a "bus error" if you  
>>> build
>>> for 10.5 and run it on 10.4.
>>
>> Yeah, the error message is bad. But on Mac OS X if you build for 10.4
>> (either by building on 10.4 or using the 10.4 SDK bundled with Xcode)  
>> it'll
>> be forward-compatible with the newer versions of Mac OS X yet to come.  
>> For
>> instance, I can run apps compiled on 10.0 quite well on 10.5, with no
>> tweaking at all. Seems on Linux if you choose the old lib it won't run  
>> on
>> the newer distos. That looks worse to me.
>
> This is usually not a problem as most linux software is free (as in
> freedom) and has open source code though.
>
> Commercial applications can simply provide multiple binaries. Just
> like the situation is getting for XP/Vista as well (I know, it's only
> really games, and it's not really the same situation, but anyway ...)
>

It's more like x86/x86_64 situation.

> DMD source code being available is a good start, but as I understand
> it, Linux distributions are still not allowed to redistribute it ? Or
> binaries of a modified source build ?
>
> -Tomas
>

Is there a need for that? Gentoo ebuild can automatically fetch source code from digitalmars.com and compile the binary (given the ebuild, of course), and I believe other distros can do the same.

>>
>> --
>> Michel Fortin
>> michel.fortin at michelf.com
>> http://michelf.com/
>>
>>