[Insight-developers] Fwd: [Forwarded] gcc 2.96

[Bill Hoffman]

>Date: Fri, 6 Oct 2000 11:04:04 +0200 (MET DST)
>From: Peter.Vanroose at esat.kuleuven.ac.be
>To: vxl at robots.ox.ac.uk
>Subject: [Forwarded] gcc 2.96
>
>[[Forwarded from  gcc-announce-owner at gcc.gnu.org]]
>
>   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 <http://gcc.gnu.org/steering.html>