Re: glibc 2.1.95 (5th test release)

[Geoff Keating <geoffk@cygnus.com>]

> Date: Sat, 14 Oct 2000 20:13:59 -0400
> From: Daniel Jacobowitz <dan@debian.org>

> > It strikes me that it might be a good idea to set up a branch on
> > sourceware gcc to mark the date of the C++ ABI that glibc 2.2-based
> > ppc linux distributions use, if y'all want to share the same ABI.  My
> > suggested date would be the snapshot before 20000905T000500Z.
> 
> I'm not at all sure I want to go this route.  We're more or less
> committed to using the same GCC on all our architectures.  After the
> amount of flak Red Hat is taking for using a snapshot, even with a good
> understanding of the issues, I'm not sure that it's a good idea to do
> the same.
>
> If I understand correctly, Debian had been looking vaguely at testing
> GCC snapshots, but was certainly not planning on shipping with them
> until at least much closer to 3.0.
> 
> What are the odds we could use this to merge the relevant fixes onto a
> 2.95 branch again?  I understand that the differences are staggering
> and the manpower short, but is it a feasible task?  I don't have a
> whole lot of time, but I would be willing to do what I can to see this
> happen.

At Red Hat, we had about six months once the choices became apparent,
and you can see what choice we made.  I personally have no time (in
fact, probably negative time) to do it in; I'll be lucky to get a
working glibc with the not-publicly-available toolchain I'm using now.

I believe that if we had been able to predict the strength of the
reaction to using a GCC snapshot in our main Linux distribution, we'd
have consulted more in advance about the possible choices but
ultimately we would have still done it, because there were no other
good choices. The position for Debian is a bit different, because you
don't sell compiler support; one of the big factors influencing our
choice was that we didn't want to be supporting a four-year-old
compiler in 2002.

Well, I'll let you guys worry about it.  Tell me if you do want a branch.

-- 
- Geoffrey Keating <geoffk@cygnus.com>