Five years out, and still stable. (Or how I installed new git on old unix)

So, I have an OpenBSD 3.9 machine. It's circa 2006 since I last updated it. Lame, I know, but it's stable, doesn't really do much, has few problems and security holes, and runs nearly no services. But I store some files on it and have been using SVN to manage them. I wanted to start using Git, since I use it more consistently these days. I thought about Mercurial, but - meh - I've stopped fighting religious wars, even with myself.

Problem is - Git, even an old 1.4 version, doesn't exist in the ports tree of OpenBSD until 2007. So, what am I to do? I could update my copy of OpenBSD - an option. A good one that, in the long run, I really should do, even just for security fixes. I could bump the ports tree up a couple of versions until the git port exists, and then try to build it and hope the toolchain works. There are a lot of moving parts to the ports infrastructure, and they evolve between releases of OpenBSD. I played with that for a minute, and in the end, decided to go for broke, and do the naive thing that shouldn't work.

I un-tarred the latest Git 1.7 that's part of the latest OpenBSD release, into /usr/local, deleted the +DESC and +COMMENT files, and basically ran it to see what broke.

Well... it couldn't link to libc.so.58.0 - fair, since I only had libc.so.39.0. So I symbolically linked it. Did the same for libcrypto and libiconv. Seriously. Just symlinked them, hoping no symbols were used by git that had been added or changed in more recent versions.

Worked like a charm.

OpenBSD, and the various core libraries have been stable enough that half-again as many version bumps in libc haven't changed it enough that git needed it - likewise libcrypto. Kudos! I know I lucked out, but still - impressive.