On Mon, Oct 23, 2000 at 12:15:08AM +0200, J . A . Magallon wrote:
> On Sun, 22 Oct 2000 23:43:30 Gregory Maxwell wrote:
> >
> > Due to bugs in the Linux kernel, it may only be compiled by certain versions
> > of GCC. GCC 2.7.2 or EGCS 1.1.2 are only supported compilers
> > (linux/Documentation/Changes).
>
> "Bugs" in the kernel are related with things like supposing that the compilers
> makes things (such as alignment or padding in structs) in certain way, that
> could be done in any other way, but are done 'that' way in gcc.
The standards state what you can and can not depend on. If you depend on
something that is unspecified then you are broken. Of course, the kernel is
special-case software so this kind of thing can be expected.
> I am now compiling my 2.2.18-pre kernels with gcc-2.95 and work fine. It is
> 2.96 what is broken.
It compiles. Does it really work fine for all tasks and all people? Who
knows. It is know that your described configuration is not very well tested.
If 2.96 is broken, I'd appreciate it if you would describe the breakage.
> That should not be done that way. A 2.2.17 kernel is a 2.2.17. If you want
> AGP, or USB, build a kernel and name it 2.2.18-pre17 and offer it in your
> distro with that name. So users can know they are installing 2.2.18-pre, and
> not 2.2.17.
RedHat (and others) doesn't just call 'their' 2.2.16 2.2.16. RedHat 7 ships
with a 2.2.16-22 which is the richest description that the current framework
allows. They also ship a source package which contains each patch separate
from the source.
The reason they didn't call it 2.2.18-blah is because 2.2.17 didn't even
exist when they started their fork. Had they chosen to call their version
2.2.50 or whatever it would have caused needless confusion and perhaps
started a versioning war (i.e. SuSE with new 2.2.666 kernel! Mandrake with
2.2.777 kernel!).
They are rightfully (IMHO) letting the mainline developers increment the
kernel numbers while they denote their version with -nn. GCC doesn't have
the ability to -nn and because of that RedHat denoted their patched snapshot
2.96 and a frigging war ensued.
The unfortunate consequence of the kernel versioning is most users can't
understand that 2.2.16-22 > 2.2.17 in terms of usability for most users.
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