[Nix-dev] influence of cpu/kernel version on builds

[Ludovic Courtès]

Hello,

Usually, programs are written against the libc API, so the kernel should
not have any influence.

However, there are obvious abstraction leaks.  For instance, I saw a
case where the VFS in a new version of Linux would return a different
error code than previous version, in some cases.  Ideally libc would
paper around that, but in practice it can’t always do.

Besides, there’s the obvious problem of encoding the result of
‘uname -r’ in binaries or file names, as Python does...

Thanks,
Ludo’.