GCC 2.96
 
The background: The GCC 2.95 series is an official GNU release and version 2.95.3 of GCC is the most bug-free in that series. We have never noticed compilation problems that we could trace to GCC 2.95.3. Starting with Red Hat Linux 7.0, Red Hat included a heavily patched CVS version of GCC in their distribution and named it 2.96. Red Hat included this version in the distribution because GCC 3.0 was not finished at the time, and they needed a compiler that worked well on all of their supported platforms, including IA64 and s390. The Linux distributor Mandrake also followed Red Hat's example and started shipping GCC 2.96 with their Linux-Mandrake 8.0 series.
 
The statements: The GCC team disclaimed any link with GCC 2.96 and issued an official response to GCC 2.96. Many developers around the world began having problems with GCC 2.96, and started recommending other compilers. Examples are Apache, MySQL, avifile and Wine. Other interesting links are Real time Linux, Linux kernel news flash about kernel 2.4.17 and Voy Forum. MPlayer also suffered from intermittent problems that were all solved by switching to a different version of GCC. Several projects started implementing workarounds for some of the 2.96 issues, but we refused to fix other people's bugs, especially since some workarounds may imply a performance penalty.