Re: Informix for Linux work with RH5.1?

Art S. Kagel said >I see no reason why third party libc5 based libraries should not work >correctly with libc6. Granted mixing some libc5 and libc6 RELEASE >libraries could cause all kinds of grief, however, third party libs do >not depend on the C/LINUX library internals only on the public >interface and the public interface has not changed! The external >behavior of libc5 and libc6 should be identical. This is not true. *Any* compiled code that touches libc interfaces may depend on internal implementation details of libc. The public interface is defined in terms of functions and semi-opaque types only. GNU libc, aka libc6, attempts to define types in such a way that they will not change in incompatible ways _in_the_future_ or _between_systems_ however it does not attempt anything other than _source_ level backward compatibility. You may often get away with linking code compiled against libc5 with libc6 but, unless you know what you are doing in _detail_, you may be getting all kinds of wierd and undetectable memory corruption as structures etc. overflow. This is exactly why you cannot link the SCO compiled Informix libs against Linux libs. The linker _can_ link different format objects together but the internal differences will kill you. You can, of course, set up a libc5 compiler environment alongside the libc6 default - if you read enough documentation... Mike -- .----------------------------------------------------------------------. | Mike Jagdis | Internet: mailto:mike@roan.co.uk | | Roan Technology Ltd. | | | 54A Peach Street, Wokingham | Telephone: +44 118 989 0403 |