FC4 good new tech, bad legacy support

[Richard Kelsch]

Les Mikesell wrote:

>On Fri, 2005-07-01 at 03:04, Richard Kelsch wrote:
>  
>
>>An OS with an open-source community can not be tied down at the whim
>>of a group of bearded men with a clean coding fetish.  It runs totally
>>counter to the idea of software from the community. 
>>    
>>
>
>Since you haven't, in all your ranting, mentioned a single specific
>bug that we might hope could be fixed and certainly not fixed by
>waiting, what is your suggestion to make things better here?  Fedora
>doesn't control the C language or gcc versions.  If those move in a way
>that breaks old stuff - or refuses to build old already-broken stuff,
>what do you expect a distribution on a fast release schedule to do?
>If you are going to criticize, be constructive.
>
>  
>
I hit "send" too soon.  I apologize if that statement made anyone on the 
Fedora team feel I was directing the bearded jab at them.  No, I was 
expressing my views on gcc.  My only beef with Fedora was why was it 
(gcc4) implemented without sufficient warning of its possible effects.  
In fact, the release notes just briefly mention a difference in using 
"lvalues" in an illegal way and that's it.  Ok, what's than mean for me 
as a user?  What possible changes or negative results may I encounter?  
Are there any places to go to perhaps to learn how to correct any 
problems resulting from the gcc upgrade?  I understand that the Fedora 
team most likely did the change for performance reasons, and not to 
throw a monkey wrench into the community just because they could.  
Please let this be clear.

Constructive enough for you?