Date: Sat, 30 Sep 2000 04:10:59 +0200
From: Marc Lehmann <pcg@goof.com>
Do you really think that explicitly supporting broken distributions
(redhat 7.0 comes with a experimental snapshot of gcc which is neither
binary compatible to 2.95 nor to 3.0, cutting binary compatibility to all
other gnu/linux distributions) really is the right thing? ;)
Anyway, the gcc project was just forced to bump the version number of gcc
to 2.97 so it became possible to identify borken wild 2.96's from official
gcc snapshots...
It's not just gcc which RedHat did this to. They do this regularly with
the kernel (where they've used 2.2.17preXX kernels), glibc (they are
shipping with a beta of glibc 2.2 in RH 7.0), XFree-86 (they're using an
unstable snapshot of XFree86 taken from the CVS repository --- the
XFree86 folks I talked to weren't impressed with the stability of the
snapshot they took, and weren't entirely happy with RH's decision), etc.
At this point, I can only hope and pray that Ulrich Drepper doesn't
choose to make any backwards incompatible changes between 2.1.94 and
2.2. He's within his rights to do so, but if he does, it will make
RedHat possibly incompatible with all other Linux distributions.
Sigh, we've had ISV's already complaining that it's too hard ship
versions which are compatible with all the various distributions.
Unfortunately it may be that RH 7.0 isn't going to help things in this
regard. Hopefully ISV's will be able to figure out for themselves that
it would be a Bad Idea to develop applications under RH 7.0, since it
might compromise their cross-distribution portability.
If you don't like this, I suggest you send mail complaining to RedHat.
Customer complaints are going to be the only way that RH is going to be
influenced not to play games like this....
- Ted
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This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Sat Sep 30 2000 - 21:00:26 EST