Re: Discussion about why GNU/Linux system upgrades cause old programs to break

"Dr. Arne Babenhauserheide" <[email protected]> Wed, 12 Aug 2026 13:52:25 +0200

Newsgroups	gmane.emacs.devel
Message-ID	<[email protected]>

[email protected] writes:

> On the flip side, Debian has superb support for cross-building packages
> for other OS versions and architectures, so you can even build packages
> for a Debian Arm 64 Trixie running on a Debian AMD 64 bookworm.

Yes it does. There’s a reason why I use debian for releases. And the
existence of oldstable is also great. And it is annoying that we still
have users stuck on Java 8 (released 12 years ago). There are many
features we cannot use because of those users.

And this is an example of the larger problem at play in compatibility:
Java has backwards compatibility to old standards. You can select the
old standard as target, and you can run old code in new Java.

But to have code that runs on old Java releases, you actually have to
build your code with the old versions since the bytecode created by the
newer versions doesn’t actually run correctly on Java 8: the library
layout changed.

That’s like needing an old gcc release to compile old program releases.

Best wishes,
Arne
-- 
Unpolitisch sein
heißt politisch sein,
ohne es zu merken.
https://www.draketo.de

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