GCC 4 Preview in RHEL 4

GCC 4 Preview in RHEL 4

Posted Feb 24, 2005 11:15 UTC (Thu) by amacater (subscriber, #790)
In reply to: GCC 4 Preview in RHEL 4 by dowdle
Parent article: Fedora Core 4 Test 1 slips

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.

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