GCC 4 Preview in RHEL 4

Posted Feb 24, 2005 4:25 UTC (Thu) by lakeland (subscriber, #1157) [Link]

The gcc 2.96 fiasco was a big deal. Programs built on redhat could not be
reliably run on any other distro. It worked 99% of the time, almost as if
the other platform was 'unstable'. For people trying to support two
distros, it was a nightmare.

I disagree with your claim that RH's intimate knowledge of GCC allows them
to choose an unreleased version. Sometimes that familiarity means you can
overlook the weaknesses/lack of polish. Just look at how many people are
still running kernel 2.2 or 2.4 -- many people just don't care about
dozens of better features, just about stability, consistancy and
reliability.

Of course, 2.96 was all a long time ago now, and I really don't see
anything wrong with RH including a preview release of a compiler with
their distro -- just as long as it isn't the default.

Posted Feb 24, 2005 10:31 UTC (Thu) by rmyorston (subscriber, #6626) [Link]

Compiler versions, and ABI compatibility, are a big deal, particularly in the commercial world where things tend to move more slowly. We're still living with the consequences of the GCC 3.0 compilers that shipped with RH72 and then were backed out of RH73.

To interoperate with a third-party product we need to use their closed-source C++ libraries, which were built with the RH72 GCC 3.0 compiler. These libraries are compatible with nothing in the modern world. Using them requires a specially tailored build environment and the installation of ancient support libraries on runtime systems.

I'm happy that Red Hat seem to have learned the lesson of the GCC 3.0 debacle and are being suitably cautious in their Enterprise systems but adventurous in Fedora Core.

Posted Feb 24, 2005 11:15 UTC (Thu) by amacater (subscriber, #790) [Link]

Red Hat does include Cygnus - they know what they're doing - no dispute.
As one of the people eagerly waiting for GCC 4.0 (because 3.4.3 has issues on a platform I use at work), I _may_ know what I'm doing :) The issue comes because RH EL is supposed to be unconditionally stable for the enterprise. If you do an rpm -qa gcc* - you see gcc4. Six months from now, when someone needs to build code which has been building quite happily on FC4 with GCC 4.0 - what will they have? - a (potentially buggy)
GCC preview version which isn't tagged _unconditionally_ as such. When developers say "it works for me with GCC 4.0" and it doesn't work on RH EL 4, what then? If a boss says - "We need to keep up with the latest code because it has feature *** which we need" there's pressure to use a prerelease compiler This is not appropriate for a stable distribution for the enterprise which is intended to have a seven year support life: I'd much rather that RH had put in useful stuff like lesstif / OpenSSL development libraries /other libraries.