[NTLUG:Discuss] Evil 2.96 continued...

[Steve Baker]

Will Senn wrote:
> 
> Ok, people, what's the deal 8 replies but not one tells
> what the evilness is.  Why is 2.96 evil?

Check out the slashdot story here:

  http://slashdot.org/articles/00/10/07/0027218.shtml

Basically, RH picked up a version of the GCC compiler that was not
ready for release.  I heard that they picked up the weekly archive
that the GCC team make...something like that.  GCC is due to progress
to 3.0.0 sometime soon and I'm guessing that RH wanted to get the
jump on that by releasing a late beta of it...which is presumably
what 2.96 is.

Can you *imagine* if someone grabbed the code for whatever project
you are working on *today* off your hard drive and shipped it out
to paying customers?  No - I didn't think so.

Unsuprisingly, the GCC team were pretty pissed by this. They said:

  "We would like to point out that GCC 2.96 is not a formal GCC release nor
   will there ever be such a release.  Rather, GCC 2.96 has been the code-
   name for our development branch that will eventually become GCC 3.0."

...and...

  "Current snapshots of GCC, and any version labeled 2.96, produce object
   files that are not compatible with those produced by either GCC 2.95.2 or
   the forthcoming GCC 3.0.  Therefore, programs built with these snapshots
   will not be compatible with any official GCC release."

...and (frighteningly)...

  "Please note that both GCC 2.96 and 2.97 are development versions; we
   do not recommend using them for production purposes."

Think about that:

  DON'T USE REDHAT 7.0, 7.1 or MANDRAKE 8.0 FOR COMPILING PRODUCTION CODE!!!

The GCC team refuse to field support requests for 2.96/2.97.

Yikes!

Anyway, to add insult to injury, there was a big problem because this
half-assed version of the compiler wouldn't compile the kernel (or wouldn't
do it right or some-such thing) - so rather than back up to a version of
GCC that would well, RedHat decided to release TWO C compilers in the distro
- one for the kernel and a DIFFERENT one for applications.  kgcc is for
the kernel, gcc is for applications.

This is simply insane and I certainly won't touch RH 7.x (or now Mandrake 8.x)
until this situation is rectified.  People who write code that is partly
in user-space and partly in kernel driver modules have an absolute
nightmare of Makefile's and configure scripts to make them build under
both RedHat and "the rest of the world" Linux systems.  Nobody who is
doing serious work under Linux should be using RedHat 7.x or Mandrake 8.x.

It's really a bloody stupid thing to do just so they could claim to have
a more recent version of GCC than their competitors.  It makes me very
angry because such a large chunk of the Linux market is RedHat and Mandrake
and this paints a bad picture of Linux in general.

I'm absolutely astounded that they didn't rectify the situation in RH 7.1.

<shudder>

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