Re: Radical idea, test backwards compatibility instead of recompile

[Greg Stark <gsstark@mit.edu>]

Ben Collins <bcollins@debian.org> writes:

> Theoretically perfect. IOW, let's not assume anything is wrong with it.
> Test the upgrades, compile against it, and report bugs. As far as I'm
> concerned, it's starting with a clean slate, and only through testing is
> it going to be know for sure....for instance, being in unstable and people
> using it.

But everyone has recompiled against libc 2.1.94 now so we've lost the
opportunity to test the backwards compatibility of libc6. That's my only
comment here.

> Ulrich's own words (paraphrased) "this release has less known bugs than
> 2.1.3", which says a lot coming from the person that did most of the
> development.
> 
> > What I'm suggesting is that we learn a different lesson from the libdb
> > breakage. The general reaction has been to run around recompiling packages to
> > work around a broken bit of backwards compatibility. Now that we've determined
> > that it was the backwards compatibility that failed I'm suggesting we revert
> > those mistaken unnecessary recompiles and actually test that glibc is
> > backwards compatible. Instead of going on faith that it's "perfect".
> 
> If you recompile them, they will be the same as they are now. The libdb in
> 2.1.94-3 is *runtime* only, meaning you cannot compile against it.
> Downgrade to the potato version and see if that still works (2.1.94-4 will
> have the conflicts removed, just for that testing).

Exactly the same? Then the shlibs file is wrong:

libm 6 libc6 (>= 2.1.94)
libc 6 libc6 (>= 2.1.94)
/lib/ld-linux 2 libc6 (>= 2.1.94)
ld-linux 2 libc6 (>= 2.1.94)
libdl 2 libc6 (>= 2.1.94)
libutil 1 libc6 (>= 2.1.94)
libresolv 2 libc6 (>= 2.1.94)
libnss_files 2 libc6 (>= 2.1.94)
libnss_dns 2 libc6 (>= 2.1.94)
libnss_compat 2 libc6 (>= 2.1.94)
libnss_nis 2 libc6 (>= 2.1.94)
libnss_nisplus 2 libc6 (>= 2.1.94)
libnss_ldap 2 libc6 (>= 2.1.94)
libnss_hesiod 2 libc6 (>= 2.1.94)
libnsl 1 libc6 (>= 2.1.94)
libdb 3 libc6 (>= 2.1.94)
libdb1 2 libc6 (>= 2.1.94)
libcrypt 1 libc6 (>= 2.1.94)
libBrokenLocale 1 libc6 (>= 2.1.94)
librt 1 libc6 (>= 2.1.94)
libpthread 0 libc6 (>= 2.1.94)
libthread_db 1 libc6 (>= 2.1.94)


-- 
greg