Re: FreeBSD build regressions

[Peter Maydell]

On Fri, 19 Feb 2021 at 16:08, Warner Losh <imp@bsdimp.com> wrote:
> FreeBSD builds packages on the oldest supported version in the stable branch. 
> Due to forward compatibility, that means all supported versions of FreeBSD 
> 12.x will work. Recently, FreeBSD 12.1 became unsupported, so the build 
> machines clicked forward to 12.2. Since there's no 'forward compatibility' 
> guarantees, this problem was hit. While you can run binaries compiled on old 
> versions of the software on new versions of the system, you can't necessarily 
> do the inverse because new symbols are introduced (in this case close_range).

It makes perfect sense that you don't want to support older
versions forever and that at some point newer packages aren't
valid on old systems, but I don't understand why an
older 12.1 system then says "but I'm going to go ahead and
install these won't-work packages anyway" rather than
"oh dear, I'm out of support, there are no newer packages
available, I will install whatever the last archived version
of the package for my OS version is" (or "I will install nothing").
I'm surprised this doesn't break a lot of real-world users...

-- PMM