ZDNet's Evan Leibovitch takes a look at Red Hat's new version 7 distribution, and comments that it is so forward-looking that it doesn't play nicely with the other distributions out there — or even older versions of Red Hat, for that matter. Leibovitch writes . . .

“Old habits die hard, it seems. My very first ZDNet column was about the pain being experienced by users upgrading to Red Hat 5.0, about a year and a half ago.”

“Version 5 featured a major upgrade of Linux's libc, which is easily the third most important and complex software component of a Linux system (after the kernel and C language compiler) . . . Most importantly at the time, the upgrade broke compatibility with previous editions, meaning that software developed on that new version of Red Hat wouldn't run on earlier versions of Red Hat. But it also wouldn't run on other Linux distributions that hadn't yet taken the plunge into glibc. The result was a mess that lasted some months until the other distributions caught up”

“I fear that with the recent release of Red Hat 7 we may be back in this mess again.”

“The Red Hat 7 package is certainly impressive, and comes with the first non-WordPerfect keyboard template I've seen in a long time. But what's most significant — for the entire user and developer communities — is Red Hat 7's default use of new versions of the RPM package manager, the gcc C compiler . . .”

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