OSS 4 for Debian ---------------- The OSS 4.0 API is backward compatible with applications developed for previous API versions. Since OSS is based on the Posix/Unix system call interface, there is no library code that could cause dependency problems with different library versions. This makes it possible to get 10 years old programs to work with the latest OSS version without recompiling (provided that the program doesn't depend on undocumented features). Equally it's possible to use an application compiled against the very latest OSS header in a system that runs some 10 years old driver. This is of course only possible if that application doesn't use the new ioctl calls.