Several glibc problems...

[Dale Scheetz <dwarf@polaris.net>]

It is time to get all of the developers involved in the several glibc
problems that I have been unable to grapple with.

1. glibc 2.0.7
2. glibc 2.1
3. kernel headers

1. glibc 2.0.7

The major problem here is that there has yet to be an actual upstream
release of 2.0.7. Altough I was promised a release soon after the Debian
release of 2.0.7r, we are up to u, and the upstream source for that
release was called 2.0.7pre6. During this "progress" from r to u, many
patches were incorporated from the 2.1 development tree. Some of these
created changes in the interface to 2.0.7 which should have generated a
complete new point release, without such an increase in the "version"
number.

At this point there is little "real" work being done on the 2.0 code. All
of the work is being done on the 2.1 release instead. This leaves me
between a rock and a hard place.

2. glibc 2.1

I have been working on a package for this release for about two months
now, with varying degrees of success. This library is greatly modified
from the 2.0 version, even though many things have been back ported. I
have been able to build it with the 2.0.32 kernel headers we have been
using for 2.0.7, and although it seems to build without problems, I
suspect that there will be problems associated with not having a new
enough kernel header package.

3. kernel headers

The sparc ports, along with several other of the ports (maybe all?) are
using kernels from the 2.1 development tree. As a result they are also
using 2.1 glibc pre-releases. The upstream maintainers of glibc are also
mostly working with the 2.1 kernels in their development, so this is a
reasonable thing to do. For the intel release, however, we have never used
a "development" kernel in a release, so from my position, this transition
is ... well, difficult.

Should we consider producing a release with a "development" kernel?

Should I target such glibc packages for experimental only?

All help accepted,

Dwarf
--
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