Hello Debian developers, It seems to me than one of the main value of Debian is in the quality of its core distribution. One of the reason of the quality is that it is not developed for itself but as a platform for the 10^4+ packages and the 10+ architectures in Debian. For example the compiler must be able to build all the packages we ship on all the architectures we support, and we have some reasonable warranty it is the case when we release.
Given that, an attempt to develop the core distribution as a separate entity is going to be impractical and to reduce its quality. On the other hand, nothing bars the LCC to build a distribution on top of Debian. There is a lot of precedent for doing so (Xandros,libranet, lycoris, linspire, mepis, etc.). I have to say the gcc-2.96 nightmare had made me distrust a lot of commercial distributions. Red Hat was well aware it was a development snapshot with a different C++ ABI and not well tested. Mandrake and SuSE were well aware of the consequences of following Red Hat on that path. Yet they did it and I still suffer from the consequences today. As a practical matter, what if the Debian gcc team decide to release etch with gcc 3.3 because 3.4 break ABI on some platforms and gcc-4.x is not stable enough on all the platforms ? Will LCC follow ? If not, how are we going to share binary package if we do not use the same compiler? Cheers, -- Bill. <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Imagine a large red swirl here.