Bug#167409: glibc 2.3.1: breaks XEmacs builds; system breaks on revert to 2.2.5
On Tue, Nov 05, 2002 at 12:43:22AM +0900, Stephen J. Turnbull wrote:
> Daniel> going to preserve forward compatibility, we might as well
> Daniel> stop developing the library. It is absolutely impossible
> Daniel> to add new functions, change the size of data structures,
> Daniel> change semantics, etc. without breaking forward
> Daniel> compatibility.
>
> Of course it's not, for the limited use I have in mind. ld -static is
> your friend. Mine, anyway. I'd gladly sacrifice the 75MB it would
> take to static-link everything in /bin and /sbin to the gods of
> forward compatibility.
If you've been following glibc bugs lately, you'll see that's a bad
idea: the thing that broke the most were static binaries, because of
the pile of crap that is NSS.
> Debian's glibc package isn't quite as good as upstream glibc on
> backward compatibility, either. Cf libdb1-compat. That one cost me a
> few hours, too (codafs passes around binary databases, dumb, but not
> easily fixable, and the Debian libdb1 package was broken---had to
> build from source).
Ahem? You'd prefer we just stopped including libdb1 entirely and let
all programs using it go to rot? That's what upstream did. We added
libdb1-compat ourselves to minimize the pain of the transition, and it
did.
> What pisses me off is that the only way I know of to get the
> transitive closure of packages that downgrading glibc will break is
> dpkg -i without --force-depends, and it screwed me by attempting to
> downgrade glibc. It cost most of two hours to get that system back
> into service.
>
> Do you know of a better way? I've tried "-i --no-act" in the past,
> but that doesn't work right---it never tells you about the dependency
> issues. And I _needed_ a glibc 2.2.5 Debian system; it was the only
> way to be sure that the change that caused unexec to break was the
> glibc upgrade.
>
> Right now the lack of command-line dependency analysis tools is my
> main complaint against Debian as a system.
Hmm... you can probably get Apt to tell you but I'm not sure how.
That's a good question :)
--
Daniel Jacobowitz
MontaVista Software Debian GNU/Linux Developer
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