clearly (to my mind anyway) it didn't matter whether we shipped 2.95 or a

snapshot, we would still be incompatible with Red Hat 6 and Red Hat 8.

3. While the C++ ABI for 3.0 is not complete, the API is. That is, the

snapshot we chose will be compatible with 3.0 at the source level. With the

exception of "export" I understand from Jason that we are now very close to

standards conformance.

4. We could either spend our QA time reviving the dead 2.95 branch, or we

could spend that QA effort on mainline, helping get 3.0 stable.

Someone on this thread complained that the RPM that we shipped is highly

patched. Bar two (the sbreg_byte patches), all of those patches are in

current cvs. Since at some point procedure would not allow us to take a new

snapshot, those 85 patches are a visible side effect of the QA work that was

done.

Frankly, I didn't even consider C++ ABI compatibility with other Linux

vendors, since I think that's a losing proposition until everyone is using

gcc3. We were _already_ incompatible, since there are a mix of egcs and gcc

versions involved.

Red Hat has worked incredibly hard to make Red Hat 7 the best Linux

distribution ever, and I think we did a great job balancing a lot of complex

requirements. Did we make some mistakes? Yes. Are we fixing them? Yes. In

fact, with Red Hat Network, it's easier than ever to be a part of the progress

we're making, and I invite people to check it out at

http://www.redhat.com/network

Other distributions like SuSE and Mandrake are using ReiserFS. Why doesn't Red

Hat 7 also include ReiserFS?

I expect that ReiserFS will be one of the options available to Red Hat

customers along with other journaling file systems as they become available.

Red Hat is working on ext3, which provides a very seamless migration from

non-journal to a journal filesystem. There are some theoretical performance

issues with ext3. It's not clear that those issues will become a practical

problem or not for the kind of applications that people are building these

days. It's also true that for some application that ReiserFS or JFS or XFS

could be the right solution. If they are part of that kernel at a time then

we'll support them.

If you see the latest release of Mandrake they've implemented some neat

enhancements. Like they have this GUI partitioning tool that lets you resize