Re: Unable to migrate from Oracle Linux 8 to Oracle Linux 9 due to Boost dependency

From: Andrey Semashev (andrey.semashev_at_[hidden])
Date: 2025-04-22 11:28:21

On 22 Apr 2025 12:44, Pavithra Raghavendran via Boost wrote:
> 
> Query: Can you please let us know how we can ensure that the OS gets upgraded from OL8 to OL9, without application RPM(linked dynamically to boost-.1.66.0) being removed.

You cannot have a packaged application that is dynamically linked to
Boost without having a specific Boost version fixed. Different Boost
releases are not ABI-compatible, so the package dependencies must
specify the specific Boost version against which your application was built.

When supporting multiple Linux distributions, including different
versions of the same distro, you must provide distinct packages of your
application that are built for each of the supported distro. That is,
you must provide different packages for OL8 and OL9, each with the
dependency on the Boost version that is natively available in the
respective distro.

As for the distro upgrade process, it depends on the specific distro.
I'm not familiar with Oracle Linux and the upgrade procedure that is
defined there, but e.g. in Debian, it is possible to just update the
third-party apt repository URLs, along with Debian URLs, while doing the
upgrade, and then apt is able to update the packages normally. In
Ubuntu, the do-release-upgrade script will automatically disable any
third-party repositories during the upgrade, but it will also keep any
packages that were manually installed and that have dependencies that
are missing in the new release (so e.g. your application would remain
installed along with the Boost version from the previous Ubuntu release,
even though it is no longer available in the new one). Then you can
update the third-party URLs and the packages from them and remove the
now-obsolete dependencies.

If your application is shipped in the distro repositories then
everything should happen automatically, as, presumably, your application
must be built for each distro version separately and have the proper
dependencies, and you wouldn't need to fiddle with thrird-party
repositories. But given your question, this doesn't look like your case.