Red Hat Linux 9.0

[Nikos Charonitakis]

On Mon, Mar 24, 2003 at 03:45:26PM -0500, William
Hooper wrote:
> > Red Hat 9.0? What happened to 8.1?
> 
> Binary compatibility.  RH always goes to x.0 when
they don't preserve
> binary compatibility.  Now you know why some people
(like me) think it was
> silly to be calling it RH 8.1 beta in the
newsgroups.

In the past, this was indeed the case.  Red Hat Linux
9's
incorporation of NPTL does mean that certain
applications that
function on older versions of Red Hat Linux (like 8.0)
will not work
without intervention on Red Hat Linux 9.  For example,
some Java JVMs
do not work properly because they make certain
assumptions about the
thread model that are no longer true.  Most of these
applications can
still be used by specifying that you wish the older
thread libraries
to be used through LD_ASSUME_KERNEL=2.4.1 and
LD_ASSUME_KERNEL=2.2.5.

But there's something a bit more fundamental that I
want people to be
aware of.  In the past we would never have tackled
something as
massive and invasive as a new threads implementation
just after a ".0"
release (in this case, 8.0).  We were able to do this,
and bring this
great new technology to a mass audience, because we've
changed the way
we consider technology to incorporate in Red Hat
Linux.  In the past
we would have felt it necessary to wait a while for a
".0" release
because we had to support a series of releases for
years.

With the introduction of the full family of Red Hat
Enterprise Linux
product we now have the flexibility to incorporate the
best technology
that both the Open Source communities and Red Hat have
to offer when
they're ready, instead of having to hold back.

One example of this sort of thing that caused a lot of
negative
feedback in the past was the delayed incorporation of
Python 2.0 in
the Red Hat Linux 7.x series.  In the new model we
would be able to
get the new releases of major subsystems like Python
in the
distribution as soon as they have been proven stable.

I hope this sheds a little light on "why 9 and not
8.1".

Cheers,

Matt
msw at redhat.com
--
Matt Wilson
Manager, Base Operating Systems
Red Hat, Inc.

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