So anyone wanting to produce "current SuSE RPMs" of their product needs to make 7.3, 8.0, 8.1 and 8.2 versions? Shawn Gordon was right. This is a ridiculous situation.
Yes and no: As long als all libraries you need are in a compatible version on all 4 distributions, you need only one for 7.3.
My program, and currently written KDE/Qt programs, use Qt3. A stock 7.3 SuSE based machine won't run it (7.3 was Qt2 based, right?). An 8.0 will, as long as compile with GCC-2.9x, but that won't run on an 8.1. If I build for 8.1 with GCC-3.2, that's not going to run on anything older. So: I have to build a version for 7.3 with Qt2; I have to build a version for 8.0 with Qt3 and GCC-2.9x; I have to build a version for 8.1 with Qt3 and GCC-3.2; That last one should run on 8.2, but I mustn't update my build machine to 8.2 because then I can't guarantee my program will run on 8.1 because of potential glibc problems. Anyone care to explain this to Adobe when trying to persuade them to port Photoshop, et al? And of course, we're only discussing versions of SuSE, not "Linux" in general.
I have a Qt application nearing completion, and was going to release it under the GPL. Even doing "just SuSE" RPMs is looking like more trouble than it's worth. :o(
But you will have this problem with all Linux distributions.
Correct, it's not a SuSE specific problem. Linux in general must figure out how to maintain backwards compatibility, so as long as an application is complied on the "latest", it'll run on all previous versions. Forwards compatibility would be useful too. I have no idea how to solve this. -- Microsoft Palladium: "Where the hell do you think YOU'RE going today?"