On Wed, 29 Jun 2005 01:52:01 -0700, Richard Kelsch wrote: > Good luck on getting many non-rpmed Perl CPAN modules to work, even > though they worked fine in FC3. Not everyone is a C programming master > with a PHD. Trying to figure out why someone in their right minds would > make a compiler not compile code it's previous versions compiled quite > happily is just beyond all logic in my opinion; It isn't. Often programmers abuse weaknesses in the strictness of how a compiler implements a programming language. Sometimes they do it unknowingly, because an older compiler version seems to accept source code which it should not accept according to programming language standards. When the compiler engineers make the compiler better in terms of compliance with the programming language standards, weak source code likely breaks. Sometimes in obvious ways, sometimes is less obvious ways. > especially since no > English readable error is generated, except something cryptic that only > a hippie-haired college professor would decipher at a glance (and > probably with a condescending tone too). These errors are for programmers. As a non-programmer, it would be very difficult for a compiler to explain to you what problem was found in the source code. > Good luck downloading anything from sourceforge hoping it will compile. One thing packagers ought to do--and with some distributions they don't seem to do it unfortunately--is shipping compilation fixes to the software developers, so their next release includes such fixes if the developers didn't ran into the problems themselves before. The reason why you may find programs in Core or Extras, which build and work, but which fail to build when you download them from their developer's website, is that packagers patched them to make them build. Many upstream projects don't use GCC 4.0.0 yet, neither the pristine one nor Red Hat's improved and patched version. -- Michael Schwendt <mschwendt@xxxxxxxxxxxx> Fedora Core release 5 (Development) - Linux 2.6.12-1.1400_FC5 loadavg: 3.25 2.14 1.68
