Re: gcc | Octave 2.1.4x | saga continues

[John W. Eaton]

On 14-Feb-2003, Evan Cooch <address@hidden> wrote:

| But, what you do point out is that Octave 'prefers' Debian.

I don't know that I would say Octave prefers Debian.  It does
happen to be the system I prefer, but I'm not really trying to fan any
distro flame wars.

| At any rate, the point of this all is to figure out how to get 2.1.4x 
| running on a RH system (which does constitute a fair proportion of the 
| distro market share).

Here's the problem, I think (and it's the same for any other Unix
variant or OS at this point).  I happen to use Debian because I think
it gets a lot of things right.

I don't mean to be hostile to other systems, it's just that I don't
have the resources to figure out all the details about all the
different package systems, and OS/distro revisions (RH 7.3?  What
about RH 8.0 or Mandrake X.Y, or HP/UX 11, or Solaris N, or Tru64, or
Windows XP/NT/95/98/2000/...?).

I don't use [insert your favorite non-Debian distro or other OS here]
and I don't have a lot of time to spend investigating problems on
systems I don't have.  So we need some volunteers to step up and help
out with all these other systems.

| Pointing out that it 'works fine under Debian' is not 
| particularly helpful.

In some ways, I think it is.  Some people seem to have the impression
that Red Hat == Linux, so it can be useful to point out that there are
other alternatives, and often, they work better (oops, I don't mean to
be a zealot, really).

jwe



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