[PLUG] On the topic of distributions

Fedor G. Pikus fedorp at wv.mentorg.com
Wed Jan 22 22:31:02 UTC 2003


On 22 Jan 2003, AthlonRob wrote:
> >   In a non-critical way, I'm curious if a lot of the Red Hat x.0 (and
> > sometimes, x.1) bugginess is an unintended consequence of complexity from
> > wrapping tools in covers that make them easier for us
> > less-technically-sophisticated users?
>
> That is surely part of t... but a great part of it, too, is that they
> often use unstable development packages of important things in their
> system.  8.0, I understand, used a prerelease version of glibc that
> causes problems with some things.
I'm not sure if RH x.0 is really that much more buggy. I went through pretty
much all versions of RH since 3.2 I think, and I can't say that x.0 were
worse than the rest. They were more different, so they were harder to migrate
to, broke more upgrades, and were less compatible with previous releases
than the upgrades with changes in minor numbers. This is not a bug,
this is exactly why RH rolls major number for these releases. According to
the rules of RH version numbering, they roll the major number when backward
compatibility is broken. So if you upgrade to the new major, expect
that all old stuff will break, and if something does not it's a free bonus.
In practice most old stuff still works (I found that I could install old
compatibility libraries from RH7 which provide compatibility with RH 6 onto
RH 8.0 and compine a binary which actually runs on 6, 7, and 8, I was sure the
old libraries would not work, but they do).

> 7.0, IIRC, shipped with a prerelease version of gcc that didn't compile
And it did really awful job on bad C++ code which should have never compiled
in the first place but previous versions of GCC allowed it. Don't believe
everything you read on the net, alot of the people who bitched about the
compiler just got lazy and didn't want to fix their broken C++.

-- 
                                  Fedor G. Pikus
Mentor Graphics Corporation         | Phone: (503) 685-4857
8405 SW Boeckman Road               | FAX:   (503) 685-1239
Wilsonville, Oregon 97070           | http://www.pikus.net/~pikus/




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