Re: Emacsen segfaulting on startup

[Matthias Scheler <tron%zhadum.org.uk@localhost>]

On Tue, Jan 28, 2014 at 09:44:59AM +0100, Manuel Bouyer wrote:
> On Tue, Jan 28, 2014 at 09:41:56AM +0100, Volkmar Seifert wrote:
> > >I updated to 6.1.3 and even with the stock kernel... and an older
> > >emacs (reinstalled) it crashed.
> > 
> > What do you mean by "reinstalled" - you are aware of the fact that
> > with a new OS-/Userland-version, you need to rebuild all packages
> > that have been installed from pkgsrc?
> 
> that's not really true.

It is true, but badly worded. You can of course use packages from an
old NetBSD release under a newer NetBSD release. But you cannot *mix*
packages built under two different (major) NetBSD releases.

> Backward compatibility is a strong point of NetBSD.

This is nothing that NetBSD can ensure. A good example is the 64-bit
time_t change in NetBSD 6.0. If you compile a shared library and a
program using this type under NetBSD 5.0 they will use a 32-bit time_t.
If you now recompile *one* of those two under NetBSD 6.0 it will start
using 64-bit time_t-s. And as a result it is no longer compatible with
the NetBSD 5.0 library or program. This will definitely result in crashes.

There have even been programs which use "time_t" in on disk format
(a particular bad idea). In this case a NetBSD 5.0 program will
happily work under NetBSD 6.0 and read the old data. But as soon
as you recompile that program you will get problems. There is again
nothing that NetBSD can do about this.

        Kind regards

-- 
Matthias Scheler                                  http://zhadum.org.uk/