It looks like RedHat is going to skip v8.1 and go straight to RedHat 9. I got a semi-junk mail from RedHat Network telling that RedHat 9 will be available via RedHat Network on March 31. It'll be available for general download and in retail stores a week later. If they just skip point releases, when can you upgrade if you don't trust their point zero releases?
Good question. I told myself I'd upgrade to Redhat 8.1 as soon as it came out, as long as they rolled back the change to LANG="UTF-8" that broke all kinds of stuff (including Perl) in Redhat 8.0.
So, what now? I guess I'll just wait and see what people have to say about Redhat 9.
-sam
The UTF-8 thing drove me nuts as well -- rxvt doesn't like it -- but it's fairly easy to fix, once you track it down.
I suspect RH is going to version 9 because they're moving to glibc 2.3, which very much breaks existing binaries. Usually, RH changes major versions when they do something that seriously breaks compatibility, which is pretty much in the spirit of the original version number scheme for apps.
Glibc 2.3 has a few very nasty surprises to those who haven't used it before. Errno is treated differently. Old binaries may die or simply not work, so everything needs to be recompiled, and RH 8 and earlier binary RPMs will probably not work. Wine, unfortunately, relies heavily on being able to poke at errno. It currently will not work at all with glibc 2.3, and as of this writing (end of March 2003) will require serious rewriting to work properly.