Date:	Sun, 1 Oct 2000 12:08:31 -0700
From:	Richard Henderson <rth@twiddle.net>
To:	pcg@goof.com
Subject: Re: What is up with Redhat 7.0?

On Sat, Sep 30, 2000 at 09:36:56PM +0200, Marc Lehmann wrote:
> > Various people I associate with being senior in both glibc and gcc (people
> > like Ulrich Drepper and Jeff Law) were involved in the compiler and glibc
> 
> they were involved, but I have reason to doubt that they actually agreed.

You would be wrong then.  Management asked what version of gcc would
be best to support, we answered, they followed our recomendation.

If you want to blame someone in Red Hat for making the decision to
ship a gcc snapshot, then you might as well blame me.

The reasons are the following:

 (1) 2.95 is the least stable release that we (the fsf gcc team) have
     shipped in a long time.  It does ok on x86, but is pathetic on the
     other platforms that Red Hat cares about -- especially Alpha.

     The late July snapshot we shipped is most definitely more stable,
     largely I think due to Geoff's automated regression tester bitching
     at people when they break the tree.

 (2) C++ in 2.95 is already ABI incompatible with egcs 1.1 and gcc 3.0,
     so clearly (to my mind anyway) it didn't matter whether we
     shipped 2.95 or a snapshot, we would still be incompatible with 
     Red Hat 6 and Red Hat 8.

 (3) While the C++ ABI for 3.0 is not complete, the API is.  That is,
     the snapshot we chose will be compatible with 3.0 at the source
     level.  With the exception of "export" I understand from Jason
     that we are now very close to standards conformance.

 (4) We could either spend our QA time reviving the dead 2.95 branch,
     or we could spend that QA effort on mainline, helping get 3.0
     stable.

     Someone on this thread complained that the RPM that we shipped
     is highly patched.  Bar two (the subreg_byte patches), all of
     those patches are in current cvs.  Since at some point procedure
     would not allow us to take a new snapshot, those 85 patches are
     a visible side-effect of the QA work that was done.

Frankly, I didn't even consider C++ ABI compatibility with other
Linux vendors, since I think that's a losing proposition until 
everyone is using gcc3.  We were _already_ incompatible, since 
there are a mix of egcs and gcc versions involved.

Flame away.


r~
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