Re: [ccp4bb]: Redhat 7* users.

[Jim Pflugrath <jwp@msc.com>]

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On Mon, 25 Jun 2001, Alun Ashton wrote:

> Dear fellow victims,
>...

We have had plenty of problems with g++ 2.95.2 and the libraries that come
with it on RH 6.*, IRIX 6.5, and OSF1 v5.  This is with C++ sources that
run fine on Windows.  On Friday we upgraded to RH7.1 and the RH 2.96
compiler (not a GNU compiler, see below) and found our problems went away.  

Some problems:  fread() would sometimes return bogus numbers, but an
immediate fclose(), fopen() and fread() would return the correct numbers.
sprintf() sometimes wrote garbage.

So for us, the RH7.1 compilers & libraries work on linux, but the previous
2.95.2 compiler/libraries do not (at least for C++).

We will have to see about GNU g++ 3.0

Jim

PS: Here is something sent to me by a colleague:

GCC 2.96
October 6th, 2000

It has come to our attention that some GNU/Linux distributions are
currently shipping with ``GCC 2.96''.

We would like to point out that GCC 2.96 is not a formal GCC
release nor will there ever be such a release. Rather, GCC 2.96
has been the code- name for our development branch that will
eventually become GCC 3.0.

Current snapshots of GCC, and any version labeled 2.96, produce
object files that are not compatible with those produced by either
GCC 2.95.2 or the forthcoming GCC 3.0. Therefore, programs built
with these snapshots will not be compatible with any official GCC
release. Actually, C and Fortran code will probably be compatible,
but code in other languages, most notably C++ due to
incompatibilities in symbol encoding (``mangling''), the standard
library and the application binary interface (ABI), is likely to
fail in some way. Static linking against C++ libraries may make a
binary more portable, at the cost of increasing file size and
memory use.

To avoid any confusion, we have bumped the version of our current
development branch to GCC 2.97.

Please note that both GCC 2.96 and 2.97 are development versions;
we do not recommend using them for production purposes. Binaries
built using any version of GCC 2.96 or 2.97 will not be portable
to systems based on one of our regular releases.

If you encounter a bug in a compiler labeled 2.96, we suggest you
contact whoever supplied the compiler as we can not support 2.96
versions that were not issued by the GCC team.

Please see http://gcc.gnu.org/snapshots.html if you want to use
our latest snapshots. We suggest you use 2.95.2 if you are
uncertain.

The GCC Steering Committee


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Last modified 2001-05-04.