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Bits from the GNU Libc Maintainers



Hi release team,

As we are really close to the toolchain freeze, let's give the status of
the glibc package.


General Status
==============

The bad news is that the version in testing is not ready for Lenny. The
good news is that the version in unstable is a good candidate for 
Lenny, but is only 2 days old, so it will miss the freeze by a few days.
I hope you will allow it to move to testing anyway.


Work to be done for the release
===============================

This version has two RC bugs:

* #382175: glibc: contains possibly non-free code
  As it is not a regression from Sarge and Etch can we tag this bug 
  lenny-ignore?

* #442858: libc6-prof: programs linked agains libc_p.a crash with a SEGV
  This bug is more problematic, and was mostly ignored as it never 
  prevented the package to move to testing, and nobody has real 
  motivation to fix it. It is a regression from Etch, so it has to be 
  fixed. If we are not able to fix it in time, we may consider removing
  this package, as oprofile/sysprof is more useful than building with -p
  those days. Also now that we can't make big changes anymore, we should 
  have more time to work on that.


Things we would like to see
===========================

Among the changes we haven't been able to make before the freeze, there 
is the switch to gcc-4.3 on all architectures. Here are the release 
architectures still using gcc-4.2:
- arm: one test in the testsuite fails. Not yet really investigated, I 
  am only sure it comes from the switch to gcc-4.3.
- s390: one small issue in the nexttoward() function which only concerns 
  the 32-bit version.
- hppa: ld.so does not work. An issue has been identified in gcc-4.3 and
  the problem is being working on upstream [1].
- alpha: most of the floating point tests fail. The problem is not 
  present in the ev67 version. Also the gcc testsuite shows a lot of 
  regressions.

Would it be possible to get a freeze exemption to switch gcc-4.3 on arm, 
s390 and hppa if the problems are fixed in a short timeframe?
Switching to gcc-4.3 on alpha seems far more problematic.


Changes from Etch
=================

Let's end by a few major changes from the Etch version that may have an
entry in the release notes:
- All Linux platforms except hppa have switched to NPTL. 2.4 kernels
  are not supported anymore.
- Tri-arch support has been added to MIPS, that is n32 and 64 ABI have
  been added in addition to the o32 ABI. They need a MIPS64 processor. 
- /etc/gai.conf could be used to configure IPv6 name resolution, as
  specified in  RFC3484.


Footnotes
=========

[1] http://gcc.gnu.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=35705


-- 
  .''`.  Aurelien Jarno	            | GPG: 1024D/F1BCDB73
 : :' :  Debian developer           | Electrical Engineer
 `. `'   aurel32@debian.org         | aurelien@aurel32.net
   `-    people.debian.org/~aurel32 | www.aurel32.net

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