*BSD News Article 34371


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From: jcargill@grilled.cs.wisc.edu (Jon Cargille)
Newsgroups: comp.os.386bsd.misc
Subject: Barriers to NetBSD/FreeBSD binary compatibility?
Date: 15 Aug 1994 20:56:30 GMT
Organization: U of Wisconsin CS Dept
Lines: 23
Message-ID: <32okpu$17u@spool.cs.wisc.edu>
NNTP-Posting-Host: grilled.cs.wisc.edu


Can someone outline the reasons behind the lack of binary
compatibility between NetBSD and FreeBSD?

This seems like a major bummer for the user community, and I think
it's one of the reasons that there are fewer "neatly packaged"
freeware programs for *BSD than for "the other free unix clone"
(mention no names, incite no flames... ;-)

The "ports" collection for FreeBSD is very nice, but I've heard that
they won't run for NetBSD users.

Seriously, I think everyone would benefit if NetBSD and FreeBSD could
both run the same binaries.  But from what I understand, they can't. 

Why not?

Jon
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Jon Cargille		jcargill@cs.wisc.edu
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