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Hello, My name is Alfredo K. Kojima and I am one of the developers of a window manager called Window Maker. I'd like to make some questions/complaints/flames about your RedHat 5.2 product: - Why there are no symbolic links from cpp to a reasonable place like /lib/cpp? - Why isn't /usr/local/lib included by default in /etc/ld.so.conf? This is a major cause of confusion to users of programs they compile by theirselves, including Window Maker. I get dozens of email from RedHat users who have problems with this, asking why they get a "libxyz.so not found" error after installing Window Maker and running ldconfig, as our documentation says. - Why isn't /usr/local/bin included by default in the PATH environment variable? This is another cause of confusion and frustration for users of programs they compile/install by their own. Many programs that rely on the bin/ directory being reachable through PATH simply don't work, as you know. - Why /usr/X11R6/include is not searched by default by gcc? Why the X development package does not create a symbolic link from /usr/X11R6 to /usr/X11, which seems to be enough to solve the problem? - Why are you including a beta/alpha version of libtool (libtool 1.2b) instead of the latest stable 1.2? Whoever downloads libtool to install in their system normally gets it from ftp.gnu.org and not alpha.gnu.org. Other Linux distributions also seem to include libtool 1.2, rather than 1.2b. So it's safe to assume that libtool 1.2 is the "standard" version of libtool for almost everybody who have it installed, except of course, redhat 5.2 users. We got a flood of email from RedHat 5.2 users having problems with libtool because libtool 1.2b is not fully compatible with libtool 1.2 The problem was actually a side effect of a strange timestamp issue on our part, but the results would not have been so bad if RedHat 5.2, which seems to be the most used Linux distribution, sticked to libtool 1.2, instead of a beta/alpha version. I know RedHat is a big supporter of the free software community, but this sort of issue is very distressing and tiring for me. I am sure that I am not the only free software writer who have been having these problems and the number of RedHat users who had problems with Window Maker is much larger than the number of help request email I got. Please reply to this -- Alfredo
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1. there is a symbolic link /lib/cpp on the RH 5.2 system 2. FHS does not mandate it 3. /usr/local/bin is included in the default PATH. 4. FHS does not require that - moreover, it talks about obsoleting the /usr/X11 crap. 5. Lots of programs require the new libtool. As you said, it was your fault and not libtool's. We could not build a lot of the final code releases in RH 5.2 without using the beta version of libtool (egcs is one of those things that need an updated libtool) So from all the issues raised here, the first one is not simply true and the others are problems with the WindowMaker code and makefiles...