Views from an Red Hat -> Ubuntu -> Fedora migrator

[D. Hugh Redelmeier]

| From: Lennart Sorensen <lsorense-1wCw9BSqJbv44Nm34jS7GywD8/FfD2ys at public.gmane.org>

| On Sat, Oct 20, 2012 at 10:04:28PM -0400, Walter Dnes wrote:
| >   Agree with a previous poster about missing Redhat 7.3.  It was the
| > best Redhat ever. RH8 and RH9 were Windows-like bloat in comparison.
| 
| To me RH 7.x were the worst ever.  Both the libc and gcc were hack jobs
| trying to get features that were not ready for release yet.  This made
| RH 7.x totally incompatible with any other linux distribution for C++
| based code.
| 
| Total disaster.  I was so happy I had bailed after 6.0's bugs.

I don't remember it that way.  I admit that my memory isn't 100%
reliable.

I think that this was the time where there were GCC project political
problems.  It was important to move GCC forward -- it was an important
pillar of free software.  FSF's GCC was stalled, so there was a fork.
Eventually, the fork won.  I think that Red Hat was pushing on this,
ahead of the other distros.

The only problem that I remember is that there were kernel bugs that
only showed up with the new compilers so you needed to have the old
compilers around if you wished to compile the kernel.

The Linux kernel isn't really compiler-independant, and was less so
then.  I consider this an unfortunate flaw but Linus doesn't.

I'm not a C++ guy (an understatement) but my impression is that g++
has been embarassingly non-conformant and as it improves, more code
written for it breaks.  Perhaps that is what you are talking about.

Summary: users experienced problems, but these were on account of
progress that Red Hat was pushing.  I consider it a feather in their
cap.
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