On 25/02/11 14:52, Les Mikesell wrote: > On 2/25/11 4:48 AM, Johnny Hughes wrote: >> > >>> >> Anyway, my point was that the fabled library ABI stability of RHEL turned out >>> >> not to work for VMware Server 2.0. But CentOS did come through with >>> >> bug-for-bug compatibility as promised, causing the same crashing behavior after >>> >> the same minor-rev update. >>> >> >> > >> > The ABI is not for things like VMWare when they screw up their updates > This was not a VMWare update. It was a glibc update - and the breakage was > dramatic, not just the slow memory leak someone else mentioned. I don't know this case specifically. But generally speaking, there are some cases where applications are built depending on a bug in a library to work properly. When that bug gets fixed in the library, the application breaks. ABI doesn't ensure that all applications will work forever. It only assures that the application binary interface doesn't change. That means that arguments being passed through library functions does not change, that functions does not disappear, looses or gains more arguments or that the return type from functions doesn't change. It does not guarantee that the behaviour of the functions doesn't change, if the behaviour was wrong to start with. kind regards, David Sommerseth