HP-UX 11.11 binaries-swinstall

[Steven E. Protter]

I can remember a support call in which I was told that I could NEVER install a binary depot compiled for HP-UX 11.0 on an 11.11 system.

Then I needed this utility called ghostscript to work and already knew it was a hassle trying to make it work with the make,make install process.

So, just for grins, I tried installing the 11.00 depot. Surprisingly it installed cleanly. In prior experiments swinstall rejected 11.00 depots.

Is my assumption wrong? Did support lead me astray, or is this some kind of situation where it might work, or might not depending on the product and how its packaged?

Steve

[Patrick Wallek]

HP Support may have been meaning that you could never install an HP 11.0 binary on an 11.11 machine.

For in-house developed stuff, or some 3rd party products, binaries compiled on an 11.0 machine should typically work fine on an 11.11 machine.

[A. Clay Stephenson]

Anything other than kernel intrusive binaries like lsof should pose no problem whatsoever; in fact, almost all 10.20 code will install as well. Everything is designed to be upwardly compatible but the converse is not true.

Obviously, you cannot install a 64-bit anything on 32-bit 11x and expect it to function.

When 11.11 was first released there were a number of utilities for which there were no 11.11 ports and you had to install the 11.0 code. It worked like a charm.