db-compat

[Jon Masters]

On Tue, 2008-11-11 at 00:23 +0200, Manuel Wolfshant wrote:
> On 11/10/2008 11:30 PM, Bill Nottingham wrote:
> > Jon Masters (jcm at redhat.com) said: 
> >   
> >>> So, this is software that hasn't been rebuilt since RHEL 3 (or an
> >>> equivalent thereof.) We certainly don't support Fedora releases that
> >>> far back.
> >>>       
> >> What, db-compat, or the SO in question?
> >>     
> >
> > db-4.1 was last the system DB library in RHEL 3/FC1.

What's the point of a "compat" library if not to support software built
for such systems? We might argue that we only care about F8/F9 and so
start removing other "old" compat libraries, but that's hardly useful.

> For ther record: compat-db-4.1.25-9.i386.rpm is available in RHEL 4.  
> and it works OK in RHEL 5 (I have a commercial EDA tool which claims 
> RHEL5 compatibility but does not work without this lib)

Indeed. Xilinx claim their tools work on "Red Hat Enterprise
Linux" (which in reality means RHEL4 in this case) but they work fine on
Fedora[0], except for this single library. I just think this is a nice
re-affirmation of the point of compatibility libraries. Once I borrowed
the binary from an older db-compat, place and route works just fine.

Jon.

[0] With the caveat that their setup scripts are some of the worst I've
ever seen. Not handling spaces in automounted CD names results in a need
to copy the CD content/remount, which is so 1970s.