Re: What is up with Redhat 7.0?

From: Nix (nix@esperi.demon.co.uk)
Date: Sun Oct 01 2000 - 10:13:25 EST


Martin Dalecki <dalecki@evision-ventures.com> writes:

> Get real: RedHat owns cygnus and cygnus owns GCC so what do you complain
> about? It's up to them to decide which compiler is stable or which
> isn't.
> (Froget about the "committe" stuff...)

Marc will probably agree here that this (except for the bit about RH
owning Cygnus) is purest garbage. The whole *point* of the Steering
Committee is to prevent any single interest from gaining control of
GCC. Note that the current release manager is not a Redhat employee ---
kind of scuppers your conspiracy theory, doesn't it?

It is up to the release manager (following the release criteria) to
release GCC. It is not up to RedHat. But they can, if they want, ship an
unreleased GCC.

Personally, I consider it extremely unwise to ship a (really rather
unstable and wobbly) snapshot --- but it does rather depend on when it
was forked. For some of this year the GCC snapshots have actually been
almost usable.

Unfortunately it'll be rather hard to consider bug reports from RH7
users for any packages at all though, because it is comparatively that
anything that goes wrong is a compiler bug :(

> I can understand redhat somehow. There are good reasons for them to take
> even CVS snaps and ship them instead of *very* outdated so called stable
> versions.

`Very outdated'? GCC-2.95.2 was released on Sun Oct 24 23:54:10 PDT
1999, according to the ChangeLog. GCC-2.7 is very outdated. GCC-2.95.2
is frankly not.

> > version. Worse, creating a maintainance nightmare for almost everybody by
> > making redhat binary incompatibly to other linux distributions, therefore

That is unfortunately correct :( I do wonder what drugs whoever it was
that decided to do this within RH were on :(

Bug reproduction will probably become extremely difficult because we
don't know when the RH GCC was forked (or do we?) and what patches have
been applied to it. Essentially RH now have their `own GCC' that anyone
considering fixing a bug report from an RH7 person must have on their
system.

Not at all ideal.

-- 
`Ergotism is what you get if you overuse the word "therefore". Egotism
 on the other hand is a form of "I" strain.' --- Paul Martin
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