Bad enough that last week the gcc organization was moved to comment. We would like to point out that GCC 2.96 is not a formal GCC release nor will there ever be such a release. Current snapshots of GCC, and any version labeled 2.96, produce object files that are not compatible with those produced by either GCC 2.95.2 or the forthcoming GCC 3.0. Therefore, programs built with these snapshots will not be compatible with any official GCC release. One hopes not.
Big things are about to happen in the Linux world, and soon.
This is the week that StarOffice gets GPLed. KDE2 will be golden in the next week or two. While Linus tells us that Linux-2.4 is still a couple of months away, it will be released by year's end. Red Hat is therefore shipping, again, a compiler dedicated to the kernel. This view is a valid one, but not the only valid one.