questions about upgrading to glibc-2.2 and xfree86-4.0
Most of the packages in Debian-2.2 seem to reflect source code that
was current about a year ago. Many newer packages require glibc-2.2
and xfree86-4.0 (or at least its client libraries). My apologies if
the answers to these questions can be found in some place that should
have been obvious to me, but wasn't.
Firstly, it appears to me that many packages in the pool/ directories
are not referenced in the dists/{stable,testing}/ archives, and
dists/unstable/main/binary-alpha is completely unpopulated. What is
the significance of this fact? I thought that
dists/{{un,}stable,testing}/ was supposed to become a bunch of
symlinks referencing the actual pool/ archive.
With regard to glibc, I seem to recall that glibc-2.1 was
binary-incompatible with glibc-2.0, at least on alpha, and that you
had to upgrade the whole system at once or risk major breakage; I
never understood exactly what the issue was. Is this also the case
with installing glibc-2.2, or is this a more transparent upgrade? If
so, do its associated libraries (for hostname resolution or whatever)
need to be upgraded at the same time?
Finally, is it safe to upgrade the client-side part of xfree86 to
4.0.x, while leaving the server at version 3.3.6? What are the
packages involved, and is there any particular procedure that needs to
be followed because of the major restructuring of xfree86 between
these releases?
I want to upgrade packages like spruce and xfig, because the versions
in Debian-2.2 appear to be buggy, and the newer packages all seem to
have dependencies on more recent dynamic libraries. (Is this for real,
or just an artifact of the build process?) Thanks for any information
on these issues.
Ian Bruce
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