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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 <font face="Courier New, Courier, monospace">Linux-i386</font>,
<font face="Courier New, Courier, monospace">Linux-x86_64</font>, <font
face="Courier New, Courier, monospace">Linux-s390</font>, and
Windows (<font face="Courier New, Courier, monospace">CYGWIN-x86_64</font>).
<br>
<br>
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. <br>
<br>
Anyway ... <br>
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, <u>all have the same ABI</u>. 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. <br>
Does anyone know? <br>
<br>
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? <br>
<br>
I don't need to keep four different guests running for build
purposes when the results will be essentially duplication. <br>
Also, I should bone-up the '<font face="Courier New, Courier,
monospace">setup</font>' 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. <br>
<br>
Does this make sense? <br>
<br>
And, yeah I know, FreeBSD can run Linux executables. Cool! <br>
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-- R; <><<br>
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