time_t incompatibility (was Re: Tracking -current + modules)

[David Young <dyoung%pobox.com@localhost>]

On Sun, May 17, 2009 at 08:30:46PM +0100, Iain Hibbert wrote:
> I tried a -current kernel a couple of months ago and found some problems
> but nearly everything is working fine here now and I haven't updated
> packages yet. (only Pine dumped core but I rebuilt it and it was better)

Pine may have dumped core because of the time_t changes.  After a
-current -> -current update that straddled the transition to 64-bit
time_t, I had to rebuild a few packages that started dumping core:
openslp-1.2.1nb1.tgz, tcsh-6.14.00.tgz, and (I think) perl-5.8.7nb3.tgz
were affected.  In a private discussion, people seemed to disagree
whether those particular packages should have broken or not, however,
they seemed to agree that *some* packages will.

It will be nice if NetBSD can provide a 5.0 -> 6.0 upgrade path.  Can
we, perhaps, annotate the "legacy" ELF objects during a 6.0 upgrade, and
make the 6.0 ELF loader dynamically link with compat libraries where the
annotations indicate?

Dave

-- 
David Young             OJC Technologies
dyoung%ojctech.com@localhost      Urbana, IL * (217) 278-3933