On Thursday 23 August 2001 19:01, Tom Badran wrote:
> Im sure many of you share my hatred for this version of gcc. I always found
> it bizare that mandrake went down this road. At least in 8.1b they have
> both gcc 3 and 2.96. However, 3 has some issues that make it suitable to
> keep a 2.9 version of gcc about, i just wondered if it is possible to
> replace gcc 2.96 with gcc 2.95 in this version of mandrake, preferably
> without affecting version 3 at all. Ideally i would do this from the binary
> or source rpms from an older version of mandrake (i believe 7.2 was the
> last version to ship with gcc 2.95). Im sure there will be dependency
> errors, especially with the horrendous incorrect dependcy issues with
> mandrakes rpms, however, if i nodeped the install, would it not work, or
> does gcc need no other libraries to run? Also, as im downgrading, would i
> need to recompile glibc and other libraries  if i wanted to compile
> programs that use them, or is the linking information compatible.
>
> Im sure some of these questions may sound stupid, but i really dont want to
> bugger about with installing a new mandrake version on both my pcs.
>
> Thanks
>
> Tom


Basically, our 2.96 is the occupation of a number that was abandoned by the gcc team.  
That
abandonment came about because another distro occupied the number.  The two came from 
the
CVS development tree at very different times and do not really resemble each other 
very much, yet
the binaries are mostly compatible.

It may be built from many patches out of the cvs tree, but it consistently produces 
reliable
code.  Most of what people see as a faw in it is that a lot of sloppy code written for 
2.95
and earlier expected the compiler to load standard headers by default.  2.96 needs the 
explicit 
#include statements.

Our 2.96 has little to do with RH 2.96.  It was chosen for one reason--You see we have 
an IA-64
version of our distro (still beta, but out there).  It stuck because it was the first 
compiler we could
wholly trust to produce good object code, even though it was strict and cranky.

Perl and Python could not pass their regression tests with 2.95.3.  I don't think you 
will see it
in this distro again.  We simply don't trust it fully.

But if you want to do all of that "downgrading" as you call it, you should find all 
the source
quite compatible, since 2.96 is stricter than 2.95.

3.0 we are still testing, obviously, and we will switch when we see another compiler 
producing
code as solidly as 2.96.


Civileme

Want to buy your Pack or Services from MandrakeSoft? 
Go to http://wwww.mandrakestore.com

Reply via email to