RFC: 5.3 Migration Guide

[Maxim Sobolev]

Bruce A. Mah wrote:

> On Sun, 2004-09-05 at 17:24, Joe Marcus Clarke wrote:
> 
>>On Sun, 2004-09-05 at 20:06, Michael Nottebrock wrote:
> 
> 
>>>The pthread libraries change probably requires people to recompile things 
>>>linked to it if they're migrating from 4.x - users updating from 5.x-Releases 
>>>can get away with setting up libmap.conf (maybe this is true for updating 
>>>from 4.x as well, can some threads expert comment on it?).
>>
>>Users should really rebuild ALL ports when upgrading from 4.X to
>>5.3-RELEASE.  Only simple applications that only rely on libraries in
>>compat4x will work correctly.  Others, for example GTK+ apps, may link
>>to both libc_r.so.4 and libpthread.so.1.  That could spell disaster.
> 
> 
> Hmmm...OK, that's more conservative than I was originally led to
> believe.  I'll try something like "in general, executables should be
> recompiled; simple apps might work; in particular C++ and threaded apps
> *do* need to be recompiled".  (Use your imagination to turn that into
> real English.)

Actually this is inaccurate. Existing 4.x binaries will continue working 
with 4.x libraries, but if you try to compile some new binaries that 
need to be linked to either C++ or pthreads libraries, those new 
binaries won't work. Even worse things will happed if you try to 
recompile or update to the new version and reinstall some old libraries 
that use C++ code or pthreads and don't recompile binaries or libraries 
that use those them - all of the dependent binaries stop working.

Something along the lines:

You can use your existing installed applications compiled on 4.x after 
migration, but remember that once you need to update some installed 
application to the new version or install new ones you have  to 
recompile every package installed on your machine. This should be done 
in dependency order - the easiest way to do it is to create list of all 
installed packages, remove all packages and recompile/reinstall 
everything from scratch.

-Maxim

> 
> 
>>I would also mention /usr/ports/UPDATING in this document.  There are a
>>lot of useful hints in there when it comes to upgrading things such as
>>Perl and X (as well as the recently recent KDE 3.3).  Plus, it would
>>give this file much needed publicity.
> 
> 
> Thanks for mentioning that; I'd forgotten.  I'll put a reference to this
> and ports/CHANGES at the end of section 4.
> 
> Thanks, guys!
> 
> Bruce.
>