Linux-kernel mailing list archive 2000-40,: Re: What is up with Redhat 7.0?

# Re: What is up with Redhat 7.0?

tytso@mit.edu
Mon, 2 Oct 2000 21:40:59 -0400

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Date: Sat, 30 Sep 2000 15:07:49 +0100 (BST)
From: Alan Cox <alan@lxorguk.ukuu.org.uk>

> If you don't like this, I suggest you send mail complaining to RedHat.
> Customer complaints are going to be the only way that RH is going to be
> influenced not to play games like this....

Remind me next time I get to deal with crap from VA customers because VA
shipped unusable NFS patches and broken PIII FXSAVE code that I'd vetoed
from RH kernels to send them your mail Ted.

Talk about the pot calling the kettle black. I think you owe an
apology

We all ship buggy code from time to time, despite our best efforts to
avoid it. And I certainly appreciate it when other people cover for
mistakes I or my company makes. I try to do the same, such as when I
had to cover for Debian users when they screwed up e2fsprogs during the
a.out -> glibc transition. (Also, if I recall correctly, there was at
least one case where a version of the busted PIII FXSAVE patch made it
into a shipping RH kernel, and we had to remove it, but that's neither
here nor there.)

This is completely beside the point I was trying to make, though. I was
trying to say that by having Red Hat ship weird snapshots of things
which have ABI implications (such as some arbitrary snapshot of gcc with
C++ ABI issues), or things which _might_ have ABI implications (such as
the pre-release of glibc 2.2 (*) --- this hurts the Linux community. It
makes life arbitrarily harder for other ISV's who need to be stable ABI
so they can write to a standard Linux paltform. It also makes life
harder for other distributions, who at least for the moment seem to
think that they have to Red Hat binary compatible because their
customers demand it.

So the other distributions end up having to take the same arbitrary
snapshot as what RH chose, which from the outside seems like it's done
completely outside of the package author/maintainer's control. (i.e.,
Why didn't the package maintainer issue a formal release, if they really
thought it was the best thing for RedHat to be using --- especially when
the package maintainer in many cases is employed by Red Hat?)

Certainly the LSB will hopefully solve many of these problems.
Unfortunately, the LSB isn't ready yet. Getting more people to help
work on the LSB would be a big help on that score.

- Ted

(*) I note Ulrich has yet to make a public statement guarateeing that
there won't be any ABI compatibility problems between RH 7.0 and glibc
2.2. I am still hoping there won't be any.... (knock on wood)
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