Re: glibc questions

[Christopher C Chimelis <chris beezer med miami edu>]

On Mon, 8 Mar 1999, Reid van Melle wrote:

> Are there any caveats as far as upgrading glibc?  More specifically:

Yes and no...

> - Are new glibc libraries supposed to be backwards compatible with all the
> old packages?

Yes, however some libs will have to be recompiled (ncurses, most notably)
and any binaries compiled on glibc-2.1 systems will not run on glibc-2.0.x
systems.

> - Are there stable vs unstable releases?

The latest tarball should be ok, however I cannot vouch for the integrity
of the RPMs available (I'm using Debian and working with our glibc
maintainer to supply proper debs for glibc 2.1).

> failed dependencies:
>         libcrypt.so.1.1(GLIBC_2.0) is needed by xscreensaver-3.07-3
>         libc.so.6.1(GLIBC_2.1) is needed by xscreensaver-3.07-3
>         libc.so.6.1(GLIBC_2.0) is needed by xscreensaver-3.07-3
>         libm.so.6.1(GLIBC_2.0) is needed by xscreensaver-3.07-3
>         libm.so.6.1(GLIBC_2.1) is needed by xscreensaver-3.07-3
> 
> and then several things broke including "ypbind" and "X".  Is this normal
> or to be expected?

There have been some changes in NIS support, so I would expect ypbind to
break a bit (although, I haven't seen a breakage here).  As for the
libcrypt problems, it's entirely possible that the RPM is not complete
since our debs contain and supply libcrypt libs as expected.  Check the
/lib dir and see if they are in there.  If not, then the RPM is
incomplete.  If they are, then try recompiling xscreensaver (I don't use
it, so I haven't run into that problem here)...the problems may be
resolved through that route.

A side note: You'll probably need to recompile egcs (a recent snapshot
would be ideal) and a few others (I'm redoing bash and ncurses now) to
make sure things are workable on your system.

C