[TriLUG] Troubled RH9

Aaron Bockover abockover.trilug at aaronbock.net
Sun Aug 24 22:59:41 EDT 2003


On Sun, 2003-08-24 at 22:39, Jeremy Portzer wrote:
> Red Hat Linux 9 includes the New Posix Thread Library (NPTL), which
> makes it "binary incompatible" with previous releases. 

Interesting... I haven't really followed RedHat development very
closely, and haven't used RedHat 9 much, other than the usual "curiosity
install." With NPTL in RH 9, Severn, and beyond, I take it that RPMs
packaged for RH9+ are incompatible with RH8 and older? What about RPMs
packaged for RH8 and installed under RH9? Is the old POSIX Thread
Library used for the execution of those binaries?

> 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.  

Well, I guess changes of the such would warrant a major version number
change. It's just funny to me, having really started to get into
GNU/Linux with RH 7.0 and slowly migrating to 7.1, 7.2, 7.3, and then
8... and then this past spring, a short 6 months after the release of 8,
RH 9 comes out... it was somewhat shocking, which isn't necessarily a
bad thing, in fact, it's probably a good thing. I mock the quick
succession of major version numbers out of humor, and humor alone ;-)

> 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.

I downloaded severn literally a few hours before the "informative" RHL
site ceased to exist. I started the download before bed, and the
following morning, the site was "down for construction," so I've been
eagerly waiting for the new site, and am wanting to learn more. I never
had time to read through the material, just start up BitTorrent.

Thanks for the info!
--Aaron





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