Has Red Hat helped or hurt?

[Sean Reifschneider]

On Wed, May 08, 2002 at 08:36:36AM +0200, Christian Tanzer wrote:
>You are just slightly off. 1.5.2 was released more than three years
>ago and was superseded by a newer Python almost 2 years ago.

Red Hat has a policy that they won't do a major number upgrade within a
major number of their distro.  So, going from Red Hat 7.2 to 7.3 won't
produce an upgrade of Python from 1.5.3 to 2.2.1...

>Do I understand you correctly in that it was perfectly reasonable for
>Red Hat to first ship a broken gcc and then change to a newer one
>during the 7.x series?

It apparently fit into their upgrade policy...  My understanding, from
listening to C++ programmers who were really following the issue, is that
the push to that "broken" compiler (which compiled without problem all
the extras we were shipping, BTW) was really necessary because the previous
compiler was also broken for normal use...  Dealing with things like
templates and the like...

>I doubt anybody would care which Python version Red Hat uses for their
>tools if they didn't make it unreasonably difficult for their users to
>use a current Python version for non-Red Hat purposes.

It doesn't seem unreasonably difficult to use Python 2.x on Red Hat 7.x
boxes.  You pick up the RPMs from python.org and install them...  Or
(shameless plug), you buy KRUD which installs Python 2.2.1 as part of a
normal Red Hat-based install...

Sean
-- 
 "All I'm saying is that when I'm around you I find myself showing off,
 which is the idiots version of being interesting."  -- _LA_Story_
Sean Reifschneider, Inimitably Superfluous <jafo at tummy.com>
tummy.com - Linux Consulting since 1995. Qmail, KRUD, Firewalls, Python