Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System

Andrew Johnson <[email protected]> · Wed, 10 Mar 2010 12:21:53 -0600

Hi John,

On Wednesday 10 March 2010 08:45:01 John Dobbins wrote:
> I was wondering if anyone can suggest an approach for building EPICS on
> multiple linux distributions (which may have different kernel versions,
> compiler versions, etc.)
>
> Does one define new architectures linux-x86-distribution_a
> linux-x86-distribution_b?

If you find that you do actually need to build different binaries on different 
distributions then that is probably the best way to do it, although you should 
not need to do that for every distribution.  We have not had to introduce 
anything like that here at the APS, although our Linux distributions are all 
either Fedora Core or Red-Had Enterprise based.  These have so far proven to 
be completely forward compatible, provided we install the distribution's 
relevant compatibility packages to provide the older .so libraries.  We 
usually build shared code on the oldest distribution that we need to support, 
and find that it then just works on all our machines running newer versions.

Note that a different kernel version should almost never require a change to 
user-level application code, although some system utilities do need to match 
particular kernel releases.  The Linux distributors seem to have solved most 
compatibility problems, and in my experience if I have a problem running 
binaries on a different machine it usually means it's missing an RPM.

HTH,

- Andrew
-- 
The best FOSS code is written to be read by other humans -- Harald Welte

Experimental Physics and Industrial Control System

Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System