Re: Testsuite ad RedHat 7

[Gerald Pfeifer <pfeifer at dbai dot tuwien dot ac dot at>]

On Tue, 10 Oct 2000, Marc Espie wrote:
> I think the Steering Committee made it pretty clear that shipping a 2.96
> e.g., *development* snapshot, with an official `release' is a very stupid
> decision.

I certainly wouldn't put it that way.

And there definitely are cases where there is simply no alternative
to using a development snapshot. Just consider ia64 and, as far as I
understand, sparc64.

> Who would dare to use large optimizations on gcc 2.95.x except for those
> daredevil linux people anyways ?

Me, on my sparc-sun-solaris and i386-freebsd boxes? ;-)

> Minor flame: in my opinion, ceasing all development on the 2.95 branch 
> precipitated the problem.

Yes, our release branches should receive more attention, and I think none
will claim otherwise. However, I have not seen anyone responding to Jeff's
call for someone taking care of the 2.95.x branch, either.


On 10 Oct 2000, Geoff Keating wrote:
> I find all this rather amusing.  The last Red Hat Linux compiler
> (for the 6.x series) was also not a FSF release.

It was, however, a release of a widely available compiler that all
vendors could easily use. Can you imagine other Linux vendors using
"gcc 2.96 (Red Hat 7.0)"?

One of the major problems with Red Hat's decision is the fact that this
makes for three compilers within one year that break binary compatibility
in one way or the other: GCC 2.95.2, GCC 2.96 (Red Hat) and GCC 3.0.

>> By and large, if we needed proof that RedHat does not own gcc yet,
>> we've got in a very major way.
> I see.  By that logic, we also have `proof' that VA Linux owns binutils.

I think you missed the "not" in Marc's message. :-)

Ah, and one thing that I have not seen mentioned here: Red Hat invested
significant resources in testing and stabilizing this version of GCC,
which led to many test-cases and patches by Jakub (and others); so in a
sense also GCC 3.0 development will profit from that.

The story is really not just black-and-white...

Gerald
-- 
Gerald "Jerry" pfeifer@dbai.tuwien.ac.at http://www.dbai.tuwien.ac.at/~pfeifer/