Re: Debian concordance
On 6/16/05, Ian Murdock <imurdock@gmail.com> wrote:
> glibc. Shipping X.org and GNOME 2.10 adds value, since sarge doesn't
> ship them. Shipping glibc 2.6.5 vs. glibc 2.6.2 just adds
> incompatibilities.
Speaking as someone with no Ubuntu affiliation (and IANADD either), I
think that statement is based on a somewhat shallow analysis of how
glibc is handled. Jeff Bailey and Goto Masanori, and a couple of
other glibc packagers, are probably the people who can make genuinely
informed comments; but having watched the final stages of glibc
convergence for both hoary and sarge, I can say that they are
significantly different "under the hood" despite both being labeled
2.3.2.
On the Ubuntu side, divergences from the last Debian glibc drop that
was merged into hoary (2.3.2.ds1-20) include subtle but important
fixes to NPTL/TLS (with particular implications for heavily
multithreaded apps on Sun's JRE), a fix for a sigsetjmp() issue that
hits gcc 4.0, substantial rework of UTF-8 locale handling, and Tollef
Fog Heen's multiarch support. The first two of these appear to have
been addressed similarly in Debian's 2.3.2.ds1-21, but there's also a
change to sched_[gs]et_affinity that resulted in GLIBC_2.3.4 versioned
symbols and thus bumped shlib_dep_ver up to 2.3.2.ds1-21. That's why
many (most?) packages compiled on sarge won't install on hoary.
All of this is on top of the extensive backports to 2.3.2 of fragments
of later glibc snapshots that were already in Debian's 2.3.2.ds1-20.
Goto-san has expressed the intention of moving sid to glibc 2.3.5 ASAP
(his first upload of 2.3.4 to experimental was in March), and Ubuntu
has synced up to his latest upload and moved forward with build fixes.
If it is Ubuntu's desire not to diverge too much from sid in the
breezy timeframe, they really did have to merge from Debian
experimental immediately after the hoary release.
It doesn't seem reasonable to me to ask Ubuntu to continue shipping a
fork labeled "2.3.2-whatever" for the duration of stable=sarge. If it
were possible for breezy to bump shlib_dep_ver to 2.3.2.ds1-21 and
hold it there, that would be great; but it looks to me like Jeff has
bumped it to 2.3.4-1 for good and sufficient reason. At least, with
some luck, packages compiled on sarge will run on breezy (but not vice
versa without manual shlibver mangling), just as packages compiled on
hoary will run on sarge (ditto).
Cheers,
- Michael
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