Bug#167409: glibc 2.3.1: breaks XEmacs builds; system breaks on revert to 2.2.5
Package: glibc
Version: 2.3.1
Severity: critical
... and yes, it is "critical", even if it only affects Emacs
maintainers. When it manifests, it's quite possible that the whole
system will break.
After upgrading to glibc 2.3.1, I can't build XEmacs without the
portable dumper, at least the following versions: 21.4.9, 21.4.10rc1,
21.4.10rc2, 21.4.10rc3, 21.4.10. All build on glibc 2.2.5 systems. A
related build problem with XEmacs is reported for bleeding edge Red
Hat, and similar symptoms are reported for Irix building with gcc, but
I don't know if those are related.
I would assume this will also affect GNU Emacs and possibly other
applications that use "unexec" to build preloaded versions.
Workaround for XEmacs: build with configure --pdump. The "portable
dumper" is now considered reliable. The reasons for not using it by
default are basically cosmetic, although startup is perceptibly (0.5
to 1.0 sec) slower in the default configuration.
The real problem is that if you try to back up to glibc 2.2.5 (and I
assume other earlier releases), you get an unusable system because
tar, and therefore dpkg, breaks, complaining that "required GLIBC_2.3"
is not available. (That error message is probably inaccurate, but
_you_ figure it out; I'm not going to rebreak my system to reproduce
it. Dammit, for libc, of all packages, it is not acceptable to break
backward compatibility, even if upstream does! There always has to be
the escape hatch of reversion to previous.) So do all the basic
system utilities that aptitude upgraded at the same time.
-- System Information
Debian Release: testing/unstable
Kernel Version: Linux tleepslib 2.2.18 #1 SMP Tue Dec 26 11:36:10 JST 2000 i686 Pentium II (Deschutes) GenuineIntel GNU/Linux
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