[rescue] [OT?] Linux on a SS2

[Phil Stracchino]

On Sat, Feb 14, 2004 at 08:17:00PM -0600, Jonathan C. Patschke wrote:
> On Sat, 14 Feb 2004, Carl R. Friend wrote:
> 
> > > with a sour taste for Redhat ever since.  "GCC 2.96" didn't help with
> > > that at all.
> >
> >    Well, I'm not averse to bootstrapping gcc on architectures that
> > it's supported on (Hell, I did it on ULTRIX 4.3) so taht doesn't
> > scare me in the least.
> 
> I was referring to the CVS snapshot of GCC that RedHat included with v7
> that they marked "GCC 2.96".  It was horribly-broken, not release-quality,
> and not ABI-compatible with anything else.  It resulted in a firestorm
> of hate mail and bugreports to the FSF, who responded with this:
> 
>    http://gcc.gnu.org/gcc-2.96.html
> 
> Yeah, building GCC is not terribly painful (in general), but when the OS
> vendor ships a broken compiler with no upgrade path in sight, eh, life's
> rough.


All I can say is, don't blame Cygnus.  That page pretty much sums it up.
We were the official maintainers of gcc at the time, and we TOLD Red Hat
over and over that 2.96 was an internal preproduction snapshot that was
not production-ready for ANY platform, but would they listen?  What do
*you* think?  It wouldn't even compile the Linux kernel (which is why
Red Hat 7 had to include gcc-2.95.3 as well *anyway*, as kgcc).

(I heard later on, after Red Hat axed my department, that the FSF took
gcc maintainership away from Red Hat because they fucked around with it
so much.  I can't vouch for the correctness of this.)


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