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Red Hat 9 To Be Released March 31
Garfunkel writes "Looks like Red Hat is breaking tradition and skipping 8.1 and 8.2 and jumping directly to 9.0 RHN subscribers
get it a week ahead on March 31st. Available to the rest the world a week
later (April 7)." The website refers to the upcoming release simply as "9" -- which doesn't rule out future point releases, but could it be?
It's been pointed out on the beta list that 7.0 was just called 7 when it came out. That didn't stop a 7.[123] from appearing later.
There is one and only one reason that Red Hat bumps the major number, and that's binary compatability. If you can't run binaries under it that you could in the previous release, then it can't have the same major-number. Period. Usually the reason for the change in binary compatibility is due to library changes (e.g. new major version of glibc).
Now, there may be political, marketing or contractual reasons that a major number is prefered, but since binary compatibility is not guaranteed between major releases, you'll usually find that the one leads to the other, and thus the original statement holds true (i.e. engineers are free to rev libs in a major release, so they do).
The reason that Red Hat would release a new major version so soon after 8.0 is almost certainly to track the latest desktop updates which have been fast-and-furious since 8.0 was released, especially from GNOME (2.2.x is FAR more reasonable than 2.0, which IMHO, Red Hat released too early).
With no PR build-up, and no listing of new features on RedHat's website (can anyone else find any, because I certainly can't!) this release certainly looks like a bad joke, and if it's not an April Fools then it makes Red Hat look like a bad joke.
I'm using 8.0 now, and RH's games with registration and update-systems combined with their ridiculous "BlueCurve" rebranding (I'm sorry, but it just takes RH even farther away from any sort of standard, and forces it's users to go to RH for software updates), combine to make Red Hat look un-professional. Why should I buy any of their software, if they're just going to come out with a new major version months later and leave me in the dust?
I mean really, what warrents this? Is there a brand new Kernel major version that I've somehow missed hearing about? Does RH have the inside on a new blazingly fast XFree86? If this is serious it's a ridiculous marketing game, and if it's a joke it's wholly unprofessional!
As soon as I've time it's back to the source and on to Gentoo for me!
credo quia absurdum