update to new packages of glibc and the Hurd
Hi,
the update to glibc 2.3.1-5 and the Hurd 20021118-1 is peculiar because the
new glibc requires the initialization of a new thread's locale environment.
The Hurd package has a dependency on libc0.3 >= 2.3-1. Do not ignore this
dependency. If it is not met, the Hurd might not boot, because all threaded
applications will fail to link, including all Hurd servers.
The other way round, there is no dependency in the glibc package for a
recent Hurd system. However, if you only update glibc, some things will
break: In particular, fsysopts with arguments on a filesystem will make
that filesystem segfault. This is the only failure I found, but there may
be others. The reason is that the older Hurd packages don't initialize the
threads for use with the new C library. So if you only update the C
library, the system will still boot, but fail here and there with spurious
errors.
!!! For this reason it is recommended to update the hurd and the libc0.3
!!! packages together.
The reason for this circular dependency is that the thread library is part
of the Hurd package, and not part of glibc as it should be. At some point
the thread library will be in glibc and we won't have similar problems
anymore.
I think that the same problem is still present in pthreads. There will be a
new Hurd package in a couple of days anyway, and I hope it will be fixed
then.
Thanks,
Marcus
--
`Rhubarb is no Egyptian god.' GNU http://www.gnu.org marcus@gnu.org
Marcus Brinkmann The Hurd http://www.gnu.org/software/hurd/
Marcus.Brinkmann@ruhr-uni-bochum.de
http://www.marcus-brinkmann.de/
Reply to: