Installing WordPerfect (was Re:RPM compatability)

[Anthony de Boer]

Lennart Sorensen wrote:
> Actually it probably was the same code base for all of the unix
> versions.  They are all fairly posix compliant and all run X, so it
> would have made very little sense to have any significant code changes
> between builds.

It's never that easy.  :-/

Back then, you'd like to be able to just get a flavour-foo box, drop in
your source code, build, test, tar up the binaries, and ship, but in
reality there was always some idiosyncrasy that cropped up and called for
some debugging time and usually some code edits, and then you'd have to
re-verify that the now-more-generic code still built and ran correctly on
your other platforms.  Just about every multi-platform project ends up
with a font of lore about things that should work, and actually do on
_most_ of the supported platforms, and the workarounds needed for the
oddball case, and you're still chasing after developers who do things
that work on their primary platform but not on all.  And things only get
more interesting if non-POSIX platforms are involved; not all POSIX is
created equal.

-- 
Anthony de Boer
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