Red Hat's Michael Tiemann On gcc, ReiserFS & More

Mayank points to this interview at FreeOS.com with Red Hat CTO Michael Tiemann, in which Tiemann discusses why the Hat shipped a development kernel with their 7.0 distribution, journaling filesystems, the openness of ecos, and the competition (no, not that competition). It's a good read, though it would be cool to see the same questions addressed at even greater length. Guess everyone has a time limit, though;) [Updated by timothy:] I flubbed, that should read "development snapshot of gcc," of course, not "development kernel." Stop hitting me.

Comments

Re:what other distributions?

[Ed Avis]

Use a development snapshot of gcc, so that C++ programs compiled on RH7 only work on RH7.

Boo hoo. So the C++ ABI has changed from one version of gcc to another - so what? It wasn't a fixed standard in the first place. If you are relying on implementation-defined details like this you will surely get bitten sooner or later.

Again change their RPM binary format (for the utterly stupid reason that it now supports bzip2 compression), so RH7 RPMs only work on RH7.

Just get RPM 3.0.5 which is forwards-compatible with 4.0.

Use a glibc2.2 development snapshot, so that again, their RPMs only work on RH7.

Red Hat have upgraded the C library in the past, what's so wrong with doing it this time? Surely you don't advocate that we should all still be on libc4 in order to keep binary compatibility?