Re: making a 2.95.4 release

[Erik Schnetter <schnetter at uni-tuebingen dot de>]

On Sun, 31 Mar 2002 14:06:18 +0200, Richard Zidlicky wrote:

> On Thu, Mar 28, 2002 at 09:22:14AM -0800, David O'Brien wrote:
>
> > For various reason people are still downloading and using 2.95.3 to this
> > day.  GCC 3.x is also inappropriate for some of the BSD releases due to
> > the major changes between 2.95->3.0.  Just this week someone else was
> > asking for a 2.95.4 release.
>
> yes, there are difference between 2.95 and 3.0 or 3.1. However for 
> many architectures 2.95 is too old and only additional headache.
> I would really appreciate if some of the bigger distributions would
> finally drop the old c**p. The fact that a few packages need little 
> patches is imho not an excuse to use a broken compiler forever.

gcc 3.0 was for a long time unsuitable for me due to bugs in preprocessing 
Fortran code.  gcc 3.0.4 is (finally) the first version that works for me.  I 
decided to switch not yet, because the C++ incompatibilities between 2.95 and 
3.0 would force me to recompile many libraries, and force me to compile some 
libraries myself where I can right now use a precompiled package.

I am using SuSE 7.3, and I am glad they did not swich to 3.0 that quickly.  
For me, the compilers are not the tools I develop, but are the tools I 
develop /with/.  Just knowing about the old bugs is often good enough for me, 
and is better than to spend a week or two recompiling everything, and finding 
new workarounds for the new bugs.

I am not asking for a 2.95.4 release, because 2.95.3 works fine for me.  But 
you should not call these versions "old c**p", because -- from my point of 
view -- the 3.0 releases are more broken than 2.95, in the very personal 
sense that I have had more problems with them so far.  3.0.4 seems to be all 
right by now, but I would still trust it less than 2.95.3.  I hope that the 
new SuSE 8.0 will be based on 3.0.4, but I even more hope it won't be based 
on 3.0.3.

-erik

-- 
Erik Schnetter <schnetter@uni-tuebingen.de>
Web: http://www.tat.physik.uni-tuebingen.de/~schnette/