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Re: gcc 2.98 release better approach?


Jack Howarth wrote:

>     I wanted to just make a suggestion. Given that a rather
> large vendor has stirred the pot on this by releasing a cvs
> version of gcc perhaps a change in plan might help. Rather
> than going straight to gcc 3.0 without official releases
> wouldn't it make more sense to branch a 2.98 release just
> before the v3.0 libstdc++ was switched on in the gcc cvs?

With all due respect - No.  This has been brought up on the Steering
Committee's mailing list too, and I dead set against it.

There are basically two reasons for it, one technical, one political.

1. We (i.e. the SC) set out to produce GCC 3.0 about a year ago.
   The goal was to break C++ binary compatibility once again -
   and *only* once.  We cannot stop Red Hat from issuing
   a half-way compiler (although we would have tried had they
   asked us), but we are *not* going to make that mistake ourselves.

2. We cannot just issue an intermediate release because one
   GNU/Linux distributor chose to do so.  Not only would we piss
   off all other distributors (not to mention the *BSD crowd) for
   bowing to this one vendor, but GCC is not "just" a GNU/Linux/*BSD
   compiler ... Lots of people use it on various Unices and
   MS Window systems (either under cygwin or mingw).

Hope this clears things up.

Cheers,

-- 
Toon Moene - mailto:toon@moene.indiv.nluug.nl - phoneto: +31 346 214290
Saturnushof 14, 3738 XG  Maartensdijk, The Netherlands
GNU Fortran 77: http://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/g77_news.html
GNU Fortran 95: http://g95.sourceforge.net/ (under construction)

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