On Fri, Dec 21, 2001 at 10:25:52AM +0100, William Chesters wrote:
> Florian Hars writes:
>  > On Thu, Dec 20, 2001 at 02:49:17PM -0800, Ian Zimmerman wrote:
>  > > Is it worth polluting the source for the sake of an out-and-out vendor
>  > > bug?  I'd say no.
>  > 
>  > There is a clean solution to this problem, as implemented in the
>  > configure-script of mplayer [...]
>  > 
>  >   if test "$cc_verc_fail" ; then
>  >     cat <<EOF
>  > 
>  > *** Please downgrade/upgrade C compiler to gcc-2.95.x or gcc-3.x version! ***
>  > 
>  >         GCC 2.96 IS NOT AND WILL NOT BE SUPPORTED BY US !
>  > EOF
>  >     die "Bad gcc version"
> 
> Luckily the ocaml team are much too sensible to go this way.  For
> those who are tempted, take a look at
> 
>     http://www.linuxworld.com/site-stories/2001/1214.mplayer.html
> 
> "... boorish developers who think of themselves as a sort of
> intellectual jeunesse doree ... The attitude I mentioned earlier was
> noticeable in the comments on the project's page at freshmeat, ... in
> the MPlayer team's remarks about gcc 2.96 ... Actually, the team's
> infamous anti-Red Hat rhetoric has been toned down slightly. At Red
> Hat's request, some false statements the developers made about 2.96
> have been removed from MPlayer's Web site. The team still lets you
> know at every opportunity what they think of Red Hat, which gets
> tiresome fast."
> 
> Basically this approach is absolutely guaranteed to give the
> impression that you are over-fussy, arrogant, inconsiderate of real
> users' needs etc.  RedHat is too big to ignore and get away with it:
> every time they pull some stunt like this, lots of developers waste
> lots of time and credibility attempting to convince users that it's
> All Red Hat's Fault---eventually succeeding only to discover that the
> users still blame them not RH.

But i remember something similar about gcc 2.7.x or at least one of them that
didn't work well with ocaml back then (96-97 time frame i think). There was
just a small test in the configure script and if it detected a not working
gcc, there was a notice of problems with it and it just stopped.

You may very well be able to say the same thing in a more milder way, and it
would not cause any kind of problem, i think.

Friendly,

Sven Luther
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