[gobolinux-devel] Glibc Upgrade

[Jonas Karlsson]

On Sun, 22 Oct 2006 17:29:36 +0200, André Detsch <detsch at gmail.com> wrote:

> Since 013 final is coming soon, its probably time for us to start
> compile official packages with Glibc 2.4.
>
> At this moment, packages at the official repository are all compiled
> against Glibc 2.3.2. Packages compiled with Glibc 2.4 (including most
> of the 013 packages) were kept separate, at
> http://rsync.gobolinux.org/013-packages/
> The question is: how is the best way to perform this transition?
>
> Once one has Glibc 2.4 installed, old Glibc 2.3.2 based packages still
> work well, so I think it is be ok to keep the old packages at the
> official repository.
>

If packages compiled with glibc 2.4 can't be used with glibc 2.3.x,  
perhaps keeping the repositories separated is a good idea. Maybe  
implementing a check against glibc version in InstallPackage and fetching  
the package from the correct repository?

> The procedure for safely installing Glibc 2.4 in a exiting system is
> quite simple, but requires a small additional step:
>
> 1 - Become superuser
> # a superuser terminal has to be open before running step 2
> # since you will not be able to perform 'su' or 'sudo' after step 2
> and before step 3
> 2 - InstallPackage Glibc--2.4--i686.tar.bz2
> # there is no need to update any file inside the Settings directory
> 3 - cd /Programs/Glibc; mv 2.3.2 old_2.3.2
> # a rm -rf could be performed as well, but having keeping a backup may
> be useful
> # if something goes wrong (having a live cd copy available might be
> also useful :)
>
I haven't tried the above steps but is it really this simple? Why would  
'Compile glibc' then die on SymlinkProgram when I tried to compile it  
(2.3.6) some time ago (recall some frustrated messages on the mailing list  
around april-may)? Will not 'InstallPackage Glibc--2.4--i686.tar.bz2' die  
on the same command?

> The most straightforward for us would be to ask users to perform this
> upgrade when willing to use never packages, but I'm not sure how can
> we enforce this.
>
Perhaps implementing a check in InstallPackage. Don't make it mandatory,  
but let the user decide if it wants to upgrade glibc. After all it can  
really break the system if it goes wrong.

-- 
/Jonas

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