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.