“Watching the recent food fight over Red Hat’s 7.0 release
brings to mind something that very few people in our industry,
especially programmers, seem to remember: Learning from our own
mistakes is always a good thing, but learning from the mistakes of
others is even better. After all, if we’re open-minded enough we
can still get the benefit of the lesson without having to endure
the pain/embarrassment/inconvenience/whatever of making the error.
Think of it as open source learning.”
“I won’t jump into the whole sophomoric mess regarding the
original Slashdot discussion over the number of bugs that were or
weren’t in Red Hat 7.0 when it shipped. There’s no point in fanning
those embers. But one detail of Red Hat Linux 7.0 is intriguing and
worthy of programmers’ attention: The gcc situation.“
“In case you missed it, Red Hat 7.0 ships with two copies of
gcc. The standard one, named “gcc”, is really version 2.96, which
the GNU developers say is not, and never will be, an official
release, and has some compatibility issues with versions both
preceding and following it. Also included in 7.0 is something
called “kgcc”, which is really egcs 1.1.2/gcc 2.91.66, and is the
compiler that must be used for kernel builds and in those
situations that require more extensive and reliable
compatibility.”