Re: SEUL: Yada Yada Yada

[William T Wilson <fluffy@benatar.dunadan.com>]

On Mon, 5 Jan 1998, Randy Heineke wrote:

> 7. RedHat 5.0 is based on beta glibc.  I am somewhat amazed that RedHat

Yeah, this blows.  On the other hand, the a.out -> ELF transition was
hardly smoother.  The problem, of course, is that RedHat has specifically
made it difficult to use libc5 programs (they will admit to this) in order
to encourage a faster migration to libc6.  Those of us running production
systems instead of hobbyist systems do not necesarily appreciate this
attitude.  :)

> worry about a trend where Linux is beta or nothing ruining the wonderful
> record of stability that Linux has established.

Blah.  Everything in Linux is perpetually in beta.  That's just the way
Linux works.  :)  Don't forget that libc4 and libc5 were also based off of
an earlier and even less mature version of glibc.  But once people got a
little experience coping with them and everything gradually became based
off of the newer libc's, everything generally worked out (except for
gnumalloc stupidity :) ).  I expect the same thing to happen with glibc.
I just hope we don't have to continue making these transitions every year
or every other year.  :!  It's like Windows going from 16bit to 32bit.
Except instead of every ten years we get to do it every year.  Not fun.