To: gcc-announce at gcc dot gnu dot org
Subject: GCC 2.96
From: Gerald Pfeifer pfeifer at dbai dot tuwien dot ac dot at
Date: Fri, 6 Oct 2000 01:58:11 +0200 (CEST)
It has come to our attention that some GNU/Linux distributions
are currently shipping with “GCC 2.96”.
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.
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. Actually, C and Fortran code will probably be compatible,
but code in other languages, most notably C++ due to
incompatibilities in symbol encoding (“mangling”), the standard
library and the application binary interface (ABI), is likely to
fail in some way. Static linking against C++ libraries may make a
binary more portable, at the cost of increasing file size and
memory use.
To avoid any confusion, we have bumped the version of our
current development branch to GCC 2.97.
Please note that both GCC 2.96 and 2.97 are development
versions; we do not recommend using them for production purposes.
Binaries built using any version of GCC 2.96 or 2.97 will not be
portable to systems based on one of our regular releases.
If you encounter a bug in a compiler labeled 2.96, we suggest
you contact whoever supplied the compiler as we can not support
2.96 versions that were not issued by the GCC team.
Please see http://gcc.gnu.org/snapshots.html
if you want to use our latest snapshots. We suggest you use 2.95.2
if you are uncertain.
The GCC Steering Committee http://gcc.gnu.org/steering.html