[TriLUG] Troubled RH9

Jeremy Portzer jeremyp at pobox.com
Sun Aug 24 22:33:23 EDT 2003


On Sun, 2003-08-24 at 21:48, Aaron Bockover wrote:
> When I first downloaded Severn, rhl.redhat.com hadn't been stripped to
> the single boring page it is now. On that "old" RHL site, severn was
> noted as being a potential 9.1 release, which was initially odd to me,
> considering RH jumped from 8 to 9, even though I still don't understand
> the technical logic in that decision... there wasn't anything
> groundbreaking in 9 from 8,

Red Hat Linux 9 includes the New Posix Thread Library (NPTL), which
makes it "binary incompatible" with previous releases.  This means that
a binary compiled with NPTL for RHL 9 will not necessarily run on
previous releases, and that you might have problems with backward
compatibility, as well.  (Usually that can be worked around with
appropriate LD_ASSUME_KERNEL settings, however.)

If you go back through the history of Red Hat Linux, you'll see that
major changes in binary compatibility have always resulted in a new
major version number.  My understanding, also from the
http://rhl.redhat.com/ web site that's now gone, is that the faster
development cycle will result in less emphasis on forward compatibility
(ie, the ability for binaries compiled on new versions to work properly
on old verions).  Therefore, each new release will be a major release.  

On the RHL beta list, however, there was some talk of release a point
release after Cambridge comes out, to add in the 2.6 kernel.  (Cambridge
is the code name for which Severn is the beta.)

I could be completely wrong about some of this, but this is what I've
gathered from watching the -beta-list and -devel-list for a while.  I
really wish the http://rhl.redhat.com/ web site would go back up to put
these kinds of questions "in print" instead of always rumors.

--Jeremy

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