Re: [Caml-list] Segv while compiling ocaml-3.04

[William Chesters <williamc@paneris.org>]

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.

My &euro;1E-2.
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