[colug-432] ABI and hardware architecture and OS match-ups

[Rick Troth]

For a long time, I've maintained a habit of building pet packages for
all platforms near my circle of daily/weekly activity. These days,
that's Linux-i386, Linux-x86_64, Linux-s390, and Windows (CYGWIN-x86_64).

Some habits can be obsessive. Some obsessions can be a real time sink. I
justify this because the "doctor's bag" of pre-built stuff has actually
helped in my day job.

Anyway ...
The demise of one server at the home office led to a
designed-for-hosting replacement, so now I might could keep other
systems running longer than just an hour at a time. (Plus, I pushed the
Windoze pig off of my desktop system to the new machine. That was a
major help.) But I have this gnawing suspicion that FreeBSD, PCBSD,
OpenBSD, even NetBSD, _all have the same ABI_. That is to say, something
compiled on OpenBSD might actually run as-is on FreeBSD. This might be
true for Darwin too. And then there's Minix. Oy vey.
Does anyone know?

Linux is Linux, so there's no point re-building for Debian, SUSE, RH,
ClefOS, or CentOS. Once done for the given HW architecture (and
salvation from shared library hell has been provided and embraced) the
single compilation works across all of them. Are the BSDs sorta like
distros?

I don't need to keep four different guests running for build purposes
when the results will be essentially duplication.
Also, I should bone-up the 'setup' logic in these pet packages so that
if I have (e.g.) GPG built for FreeBSD and I'm on OpenBSD (and they do
share ABI) the automation will know "yes, it actually is available" by
the different name.

Does this make sense?

And, yeah I know, FreeBSD can run Linux executables. Cool!

-- R; <><



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