[erlang-questions] Creating an application that is portable across versions of CentOS

[zxq9]

On 2014年12月20日 土曜日 22:37:25 you wrote:
> I don't confirm this.
> Erlang R16B03-1 binaries built on Centos 5.10 with static openssl and
> disabled ncurses are portable between Centos 5.10. 6.5 and 7.0, Fedora 19
> and 20, tested this myself on digitalocean droplets and by some of my
> clients who run the software with bundled in Erlang on their own servers.
> 
> The same is true with Ubuntu 10.04, 12.04, 14.04, 14.10, Debian 6.0 and 7.0
> with binaries built on Debian 6.0.
> 
> It might depend on libc or something other, but in general they are
> portable or at least sometimes are portable.

That is the magic of forward portability *and* backported patches and 
developer tools RedHat has backported to the 5.x line that have been gradually 
added since 5.6 or so and wound up in 5.10 (but don't exist in earlier 
versions). This will not work from 5.2, and a build from 5.10 will probably 
not run on 5.2 (in particular, wx built on 5.10 will probably not work on 
5.2). A build made on 6.x will not run on 5.x, and a build on 7.x won't run on 
6.x or 5.x.

That is, of course, unless you build everything statically -- which is a whole 
different discussion.

Going forward is always easier than going backward -- its a sort of "least 
common denominator" effect with regard to mature, stable APIs.