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

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Mon, Oct 22, 2012 at 02:54:08PM -0400, D. Hugh Redelmeier wrote:
> 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.

http://gcc.gnu.org/gcc-2.96.html

That was one of the problem with redhat 7.x

They were too impatient to wait for 3.0 to be done.  It was far from
stalled at the time.

But the decision makers at redhat just had to have the new gcc 3.0
features that weren't quite ready yet.  Never mind what the gcc developers
think.

> 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.

If the gcc developers say "Don't do that", then that is NOT pushing
development.  It is rather hindering it.  You are wasting their time
with issues they don't want to deal with.  gcc 3.0 was getting close
to done.

-- 
Len Sorensen
--
The Toronto Linux Users Group.      Meetings: http://gtalug.org/
TLUG requests: Linux topics, No HTML, wrap text below 80 columns
How to UNSUBSCRIBE: http://gtalug.org/wiki/Mailing_lists