Re: Yum - Different OS version and Arch

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On Sunday, November 14, 2010 06:29:21 am Sawrub wrote:
>   On 11/14/2010 04:07 PM, Michael Schwendt wrote:
> > On Sun, 14 Nov 2010 15:51:44 +0530, Sawrub wrote:
> >> all i wanted was to know that why are they included in the
> >> results for a different version of OS.
> > Because [hopefully] they continue to work and [hopefully] the package
> > maintainer has verified that they still work without a rebuild.
> >
> Or may be the maintainer is no longer interested in re-building.

Then they would be in the orphans list, and they would eventually be dropped if a new maintainer didn't step up to the plate.  At least that's my reading of the packaging guidelines; Michael is free to correct me, as he's been more closely involved over the years.

If a package from, say, Red Hat Linux 5.2 (not RHEL5, but old-school RHL) were to run unmodified directly on F14 (don't know any that do, but 5.2 is the oldest dist I still have running in a production setting (not connected to the Internet!)) then why would a rebuild be needed?  

Ten years ago I was contracted by a company to build RPM's of PostgreSQL 7 for a number of different distributions.  I was pleasantly surprised at how portable (to a degree) packages for different distribution versions were... even packages for a whole different distribution can be made portable, to a degree, as long as package names (for dependencies) are the same, and the versions are fairly close for most required packages.  Essentially, I could take pains to make the dependencies as generic as possible, and I could install one distribution's package directly on another.  Now, since I was being paid to do this, I did do native builds for all the supported distributions; but for testing it was fun to cross-install packages.

And I know of several commercial packages that are portable in this way.  VMware Workstation, when it was still distributed as RPM, was like this.  CodeWeavers' CrossOver is still distributed in a distribution-independent RPM.  The Fluendo DVD player, Media Center, and codec packs are distributed in distribution-independent RPM's.  And there are other examples.

So, as Michael said, don't read too much into dist tags; they're there only as a hint, not as a hard dependency.
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