Re: Re: Re: Just a single Question for the Candidates
On Wed, Mar 10, 2004 at 08:32:15AM +0100, Mgr. Peter Tuharsky wrote:
> Does somebody know what I'm talking about?
Yes.
In my opinion, the most serious issue [and not one I have a good solution
for] is the state of glibc:
[1] Upstream sources generally are not buildable on older versions of the
tool chain. This has security implications, and is a general pain, but
[2] Because of portability issues, it can be very hard to figure out
what the proper solution is to any specific problem, and
[3] Building the toolchains (binutils, gcc, glibc) involves a lot of
knowledge of largely undocumented features. [And those features aren't
designed to be independent of each other -- changing one option might
involve changing a few others just to allow the build to work at all.]
Ultimately, this means that only experts can configure the thing properly.
To some degree (especially for native builds for x86), this doesn't matter
["it works, what's your problem?"], but the underlying rigidity of the
system hurts us.
We get some flexibility back because our maintainers stick to fairly
stable back versions of the code and maintain a set of deb patches,
but ultimately this is caught in the same interlock as the upstream glibc.
Until we have a tool chain which can be built on any system [for example,
an old a.out linux] and be identical to one built on a modern system,
we're going to be stuck with some elements of this issue. And when
I say "we", I don't mean just debian, but everybody else (including
"source only" folks such as gentoo).
But really solving this problem is incredibly difficult -- and it's
not completely a glibc issue because [for example] bsd is faced with
variants of the same problem using their own libcs (that's libc, plural,
not lib cs).
The general upgrading problem is a hard issue, and solving it involves
a lot of trade offs. [And this is related to the reason it's so hard
to get people to switch from non-free operating systems...]
--
Raul
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