[2261] in SIPB_Linux_Development
Re: Linux Athena questions
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Aaron M. Ucko)
Tue Oct 20 01:44:09 1998
To: "Theodore Y. Ts'o" <tytso@MIT.EDU>
Cc: tb@MIT.EDU, linux-dev@MIT.EDU
From: amu@MIT.EDU (Aaron M. Ucko)
Date: 20 Oct 1998 01:43:50 -0400
In-Reply-To: "Theodore Y. Ts'o"'s message of "Mon, 19 Oct 1998 23:31:10 -0400"
"Theodore Y. Ts'o" <tytso@MIT.EDU> writes:
> Not using libc 5.3.12 was a deliberate choice on RedHat's part. There
> were real backwards compatibility and stability problems with 5.4. I
> believe the stability problems may be solved by now, but 5.4 broke some
> commercial applications, (including Netscape at one point), and so
> RedHat quite fairly decided not to support libc 5.4.
5.3 already broke Netscape by switching from gmalloc to dlmalloc,
which is less forgiving, and I have seen people complain about
(non-security-related) bugs fixed in 5.4 but not Red Hat's 5.3.12
packages.
> remember correctly. It looks like this pattern may be repeating with
> Redhat 5.1; SIPB may end up shipping it after RedHat 5.2 is gets
> shippped. (We have *got* to tighten up our development cycle here,
> guys....)
Remember, Linux-Athena is essentially a labor of love produced by
volunteers who can't always afford to put as much time into it as it
deserves.
> symbol in libc. Part of the blame lies with the e2fsprogs maintainer in
> Debian, who did an incompetent port to glibc, not knowing about the land
> mine left by the glibc folks, and created a version of e2fsck which
> destroyed filesystems greater than 2 gigabytes. (This was a mistake the
> RedHat folks did not make.)
Oh, right, I forgot it was Debian who directly eited the most users
that way. (I remember your justifiable flamage on linux-kernel, though.)
--
Aaron M. Ucko, KB1CJC <amu@mit.edu> (finger amu@monk.mit.edu)
