Re: first impressions of Red Hat 8.0

[Steven Pritchard <steve@silug.org>]

On Mon, Sep 30, 2002 at 05:52:49PM -0500, Jeff Licquia wrote:
> Oh, yeah.  Don't get me wrong; gcc 3.2 isn't the problem here.  It's the
> solution to a whole host of other problems.

Right, which is why I'm in the "everything before now is broken, so
recompile" mindset.

Then again, as you well know, I've never been a big fan of C++, so my
opinion might not count for much.  ;-)

> That's an interesting site.  They have an autobuilder for RPMs?  Do you
> happen to know if their autobuilder is open source?

I honestly have no idea.  Matthias seems like a good guy though...  I
would imagine that any tools he might have are likely to be open
source.

> You did know that apt is written in C++, right?  :-)

Yeah.  In fact, when I was writing the last email, I thought of
that, which makes me rather curious...  When I upgraded my laptop, the
apt 0.5.4 rpms weren't available yet, so I was still using apt 0.3.x
with librpm404, and it did work.  So either the older apt is linked
statically against libstdc++ (which I find somewhat unlikely), or Red
Hat 8.0 includes some compat- packages which resolve the
incompatibilites.

I'll have to remember to check that out the next time I have the
laptop running.

> It's not like there aren't solutions.  We may have to tell people
> "rebuild all your C++ code" or something like that; we may do something
> like we did for the a.out -> ELF migration.

It's really not nearly as bad as that...  We're talking about a select
group of (admittedly large) applications, not core system tools or
libraries (usually).

> It's hard to make claims about Windows DLL issues, for example, when
> we create the same problems for ourselves for no good reason at all.

I'm sorry, but until Linux distributions start letting applications
update /lib and /usr/lib, I think we've still got valid issues with
Windows DLLs.  :-)

> I don't think I have a real point, other than whining about RH's
> propensity to rush into things without thinking.

I really hate to be in the position of defending Red Hat, since I do
think they sometimes do *really* stupid things, but I'm not so sure
this particular issue is something I'd hold against them.

Shipping a new release with rpm completely broken is something I'd
definitely hold against them though.  I can't figure out why people
aren't absolutely screaming about that already.

I'd also like to know what the thinking was behind releasing Red Hat
8.0 with a pre-release glibc too.  Hopefully, like in 7.0, the final,
stable release will be only a couple of weeks or so away.  It seems to
me like sticking with glibc 2.2 for a while would have made a lot of
sense, but maybe they have a good reason.  (Probably not, but Red Hat
has been good enough about enough things lately for me to want to give
them the benefit of the doubt.)

I also wonder about the wisdom of dropping all MP3 support.  I can't
help but wonder if this is another one of their knee-jerk reactions
(like the attitude they originally had with Qt and KDE), or if they
actually were advised to do this by their legal department.

Their "use Ogg Vorbis" answer doesn't exactly work with me, at least
not until somebody Red Hat can point me to a firmware upgrade for my
Apex DVD player and my Aiwa car stereo, plus give me a utility to
convert my 23GB of MP3s without loss (and sometime this century).

And now you have me venting...  :-)

Steve
-- 
steve@silug.org           | Southern Illinois Linux Users Group
(618)398-7360             | See web site for meeting details.
Steven Pritchard          | http://www.silug.org/

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