[Rd] Minor issue building 2.3.0 under Red Hat Linux 9

[Marc Schwartz]

On Thu, 2006-04-27 at 10:53 +0100, Prof Brian Ripley wrote:
> On Thu, 27 Apr 2006, Dominick Samperi wrote:
> 
> > Building R 2.3.0 fails under Red Hat 9.0 because
> > ssize_t is not defined in src/modules/internet/sock.h.
> > Inserting #include <sys/types.h> at the top of this
> > file fixes the problem.
> 
> That's interesting: POSIX says it must be defined in unistd.h, and that is 
> included before sock.h in all the C files AFAICS (and this is why all the 
> Unix-alike platforms tested before release do compile that module).
> 
> It's a bug in RH9 (there seems to be no 9.0), and that is maintained by 
> Fedora Legacy -- do they have an update?

Prior to RH 9 (ie. RH 8.0), there were fractional releases with updates.
However, with 9, while updates were provided, the numbering scheme
changed to integer releases only and this is still the case with FC.

Fedora Legacy's raison d'etre is to provide security updates but not
necessarily functional updates and/or general bug fixes. This seems to
be the case for RH 9 if one reviews the list of updates that they have
provided to date:

  http://www.fedoralegacy.org/updates/RH9/

There is no guarantee from the FL folks as to how long they will support
older releases beyond the roughly 1.5 years post EOL for a prior version
of RH/FC. This is articulated in their "1-2-3 and out" policy and we are
well beyond the 1.5 years for RH 9.

Seeing Peter's response on SuSE 8.0, one of the things that might be in
common here is the use of the 2.4 series kernels. Was there a change of
some sort with the 2.6 kernels that would impact this situation?

HTH,

Marc Schwartz