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The terms porting, integration, and compatibility have commonly understood meanings with regard to operating systems and the services they provide to applications:
UnixWare 7 is designed to allow most UnixWare and SCO OpenServer applications to run without modification to the source code of the applications. You should be able to install most UnixWare and SCO OpenServer applications using custom(1M) or pkgadd(1M), and they will run.
Some applications will require a recompile and possibly a rewrite of the source code in order to work on UnixWare 7.
The degree to which the target system provides workarounds to the compatibility issues which arise between the native and the target systems is the compatibility provided by the new system.
Compatibility issues are, in general, defined by:
Compatibility issues generally span all porting and integration activities.
Applications that use portable coding practices and use only those interfaces supplied by the operating environment that adhere to industry standards are called ``portable applications''. A particular application is more or less portable depending on the way it is coded and the system services on which it depends.
What makes portable applications difficult to write are the differences between the way in which system services (and their access points in system calls and libraries) are implemented on the target systems on which you want your application to work.