[snip] > Your comments above lead to another question. :-) > I'd also appreciate further comments on the "redhat special" as > opposed to "official gnu release", pointers to docs would be > fine. Official gnu release (and egcs releases) are listed here: http://gcc.gnu.org/releases.html For some reason (I don't recall why) Redhat thought neither gcc 2.95.2, nor the upcoming 3.0, nor also upcoming gcc 2.95.3 were approprate for redhat 7.0 . You might try googling their site for 'gcc 2.96 rationale' . So they cloned the gnu gcc cvs tree at some point, added some in house patches, some bugfixes, etc, and produced their own gcc derivative. (lots of other companies produce gcc derivatives as well, some sell and or support them as a business.) I am probably not a good person to explain why redhat created gcc 2.96, because I found it to be unusually buggy, I found it to produce very slow code (the C++ I was writing when I used 2.96 often ran 3 or more times as fast when built with gcc 2.95.2), and its creation resulted in half of linux distros being incompatible with the other half, w.r.t to C++ shared libs. So I think gcc 2.96 was a terrible mistake on redhat's part - but probably you should find their side of the story.
