On Mon, 19 Feb 2007, Mark Mitchell wrote: > One of the key points behind these suggestions is that Red Hat and > Novell plan to skip to 4.3 for their next releases, so we'll have a hard
> By hypothesis, 4.1 is satisfactory (shipping with major GNU/Linux > distributions, and widely used throughout the entire GCC community), so I'm reminded of some predictions: [07/08/05 22:36] <honza_away> hmm again we are in the 4.1 sucks, 4.2 will rock mode ;) [07/08/05 22:37] <stevenb> honza_away: 4.1 will suck. [07/08/05 22:37] <stevenb> honza_away: 4.0 pretty much rules, but that is because everyone uses it [07/08/05 22:38] <stevenb> but no big distro will use 4.1 This is *not* the only such prediction for a previous release, by far, just the one I found quickest. *All* releases seem to have the predictions that they are useless, should be skipped because the next release will be so much better in way X or Y, etc.; I think the question of how widely used a release series turned out to be in practice may be relevant when deciding after how many releases the branch is closed, but simply dropping a release series after the branch is created is pretty much always a mistake. (When we rebranded 3.1 as 3.2 in the hopes of getting a stable C++ ABI, I think that also with hindsight was a mistake, given that the aim was that the stable ABI would also be the correct documented ABI but more ABI bugs have continued to turn up since then.) In addition, the 4.2 release series serves the necessary purpose of providing deprecation warnings for incompatible changes in 4.3 (for example, the proposed diagnostics in 4.2 for extern inline in c99/gnu99 mode); dropping a release series would require associated reversions in mainline and delays to changes needing deprecation periods. -- Joseph S. Myers [EMAIL PROTECTED]
