Has Red Hat helped or hurt?

[Sean Reifschneider]

On Sun, May 12, 2002 at 10:12:35AM +0200, Christian Tanzer wrote:
>The compiler they shipped generated a lot of question why Python was
>"broken".

Sure, and it was fixed quite quickly with errata...  If you aren't applying
errata to your system, you have bigger problems than the compiler
complaining about some symbols during the Python build.  IIRC, though, it
was actually glibc that was the issue (if you're thinking the symbol
undefined problem that I'm thinking of), not the compiler...

>In such a case, it would seem reasonable to ship a standard gcc for
>normal use and an experimental gcc for the C++ programmers interested
>in templates and stuff.

Interestingly, they did...  The older compiler was called "kgcc"...

>IMHO, the distribution should not force a specific Python version to
>be the default. I.e., having /usr/bin/python point to 2.x should not
>break any number of Red Hat utilities. Forcing the user to specify a
>Python version in the #! line or on the command line sucks.

Yeah, in a perfect world people would write code that anticipated any
problems that future releases of the language might cause...  When you
figure out how to do this, go ahead an submit a patch to Red Hat...

Sean
-- 
 Sometimes it pays to stay in bed on Monday, rather than spending the rest
 of the week debugging Monday's code.  -- Christopher Thompson
Sean Reifschneider, Inimitably Superfluous <jafo at tummy.com>
tummy.com - Linux Consulting since 1995. Qmail, KRUD, Firewalls, Python