Bug#223769: libc6: Actually a kernel bug.
Package: libc6
Version: 2.3.2.ds1-10
Severity: normal
Followup-For: Bug #223769
This bug upgrading libc6 on mips is actually a kernal bug with
interprocess communication, which makes the forked process appear to
have failed even when it did not. On MIPS, you *MUST* upgrade the
kernel *BEFORE* you upgrade libc6: if you do not, the broken libc6
will make it impossible to revert to a previous libc without a
rescue disk or reinstallation. I believe that this condition is
serious enough to warrant a BIG warning/refusal-to-upgrade in the
libc6 package. IIRC, libc6 warns that "it may break some programs,
including perl" -- but doesn't state that among the programs it will
break is dpkg, which will severely Cramp Your Style.
The solution, as suggested on the debian-mips mailing list, is to grab
the kernel-image-2.4.22-r4k-ip22 package from unstable, and force
an upgrade with 'dpkg --force-all'. Then you will need to install
the kernel with dvhtool and reboot *before* proceeding with the
upgrade to unstable. apt will initially complain heartily because
of broken dependencies; I forget the exact sequence of commands I needed
to use to satify these before the standard 'apt-get upgrade' would
work.
IMHO, a fixed kernel-image for MIPS should be installed in the archives
which does *NOT* have dependencies which prevent it from being installed
from stable. Then libc-on-mips should depend on or suggest this
kernel-image package, and *refuse* to install unless the running kernel
is recent enough. (I think 2.4.19 is the first version that will work).
This will ensure that stable distributions will correctly dist-upgrade
to the next stable release (when it occurs).
--scott
-- System Information:
Debian Release: testing/unstable
Architecture: mips
Kernel: Linux indy 2.4.22-r4k-ip22 #1 Mon Dec 1 20:24:13 CET 2003 mips
Locale: LANG=C, LC_CTYPE=C
Versions of packages libc6 depends on:
ii libdb1-compat 2.1.3-7 The Berkeley database routines [gl
-- no debconf information
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