I hate to say it but I think Hans might have the right answer here. As an administrator that has worked in large multi hundred million dollar companies where 1 hour of downtime == $75,000 in lost income proactive prevention IS the right answer. If the gcc people need to compile with the .96 rh version then they can apply a removal patch hans provides in the crash message. This makes it easy to remove the safeguard and blow yourself up at will after being suitibly called a dumbass.
I do understand your desire to keep things simple and not put a safetynet out for every single moron out there. Personaly I despise them. But I also understand the evil necessity of doign this for somet hings that are this serious of a risk.
From the debate raging here is what I gathered is acceptable....
make it blow up fataly and immediatly if it detects Red Hat + gcc 2.96-red_hat_broken(forgot version num)
make it provide a URL to get the patch to remove this safeguard if you really want this.
The fatal crash should be VERY carefull to only trigger on a redhat system with the broken compiler. And to satisfy your agument that people may need to be able to use it, provide a reverse patch to remove this safeguard in one easy cat file | patch.
Brian Wolfe
On Sat, Feb 03, 2001 at 01:06:52AM +0300, Hans Reiser wrote:
> Alan Cox wrote:
> >
> > > As it stands, there is no way to determine programatically whether
> > > gcc-2.96 is broken or now. The only way to do it is to check the RPM
> > > version -- which, needless to say, is a bit difficult to do from the
> > > C code about to be compiled. So I can't really blame Hans if he decides
> > > to outlaw gcc-2.96[.0] for reiserfs compiles.
> >
> > Oh I can see why Hans wants to cut down his bug reporting load. I can also
> > say from experience it wont work. If you put #error in then everyone will
> > mail him and complain it doesnt build, if you put #warning in nobody will
> > read it and if you dont put anything in you get the odd bug report anyway.
> >
> > Basically you can't win and unfortunately a shrink wrap forcing the user
> > to read the README file for the kernel violates the GPL ..
> >
> > Jaded, me ?
> >
> > Alan
>
> I fear that you are speaking from experience about the complaints it doesn't
> build, and that there is a strong element of truth in what you say.
>
> That said, my opinion is that bug reporting load is not as important as bug
> avoidance, but I understand your position has merit to it also.
>
> Hans
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Wed Feb 07 2001 - 21:00:20 EST