[2262] in SIPB_Linux_Development
Re: Linux Athena questions
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Theodore Y. Ts'o)
Tue Oct 20 21:49:28 1998
Date: Tue, 20 Oct 1998 21:49:12 -0400
From: "Theodore Y. Ts'o" <tytso@MIT.EDU>
To: amu@MIT.EDU
Cc: "Theodore Y. Ts'o" <tytso@MIT.EDU>, tb@MIT.EDU, linux-dev@MIT.EDU
In-Reply-To: Aaron M. Ucko's message of 20 Oct 1998 01:43:50 -0400,
<udl90ibyei1.fsf@tux.mit.edu>
From: amu@MIT.EDU (Aaron M. Ucko)
Date: 20 Oct 1998 01:43:50 -0400
> 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.
I don't know about stock 5.3, but as far as I know, RedHat never broke
netscape. I don't know if they backed out dlmalloc, but to gmalloc, but
as far as I know RedHat has never had a compatibility problem with
released commercial programs released only as binaries. RedHat's really
careful about that sort of thing; it's one of the things they ask
Beta-testers to check out (I'm on the Beta-test list.)
> 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.
True, but maybe we can smarter about how we get work done. For example,
I can arrange to get SIPB access to the beta RedHat distributions. That
could mean that you could start working Linux-Athena before 5.2 is
shipped. (It might not make sense at this point, if Linux-Athena is
almost ready to ship under 5.1; if but if it's going to be a long while
before Linux-Athena for RedHat 5.1 will be ready, it might make sense to
target RedHat 5.2 instead.)
- Ted
