On 6/16/05, Ian Murdock <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > glibc. Shipping X.org and GNOME 2.10 adds value, since sarge doesn't > ship them. Shipping glibc 2.6.5 vs. glibc 2.6.2 just adds > incompatibilities.
Speaking as someone with no Ubuntu affiliation (and IANADD either), I think that statement is based on a somewhat shallow analysis of how glibc is handled. Jeff Bailey and Goto Masanori, and a couple of other glibc packagers, are probably the people who can make genuinely informed comments; but having watched the final stages of glibc convergence for both hoary and sarge, I can say that they are significantly different "under the hood" despite both being labeled 2.3.2. On the Ubuntu side, divergences from the last Debian glibc drop that was merged into hoary (2.3.2.ds1-20) include subtle but important fixes to NPTL/TLS (with particular implications for heavily multithreaded apps on Sun's JRE), a fix for a sigsetjmp() issue that hits gcc 4.0, substantial rework of UTF-8 locale handling, and Tollef Fog Heen's multiarch support. The first two of these appear to have been addressed similarly in Debian's 2.3.2.ds1-21, but there's also a change to sched_[gs]et_affinity that resulted in GLIBC_2.3.4 versioned symbols and thus bumped shlib_dep_ver up to 2.3.2.ds1-21. That's why many (most?) packages compiled on sarge won't install on hoary. All of this is on top of the extensive backports to 2.3.2 of fragments of later glibc snapshots that were already in Debian's 2.3.2.ds1-20. Goto-san has expressed the intention of moving sid to glibc 2.3.5 ASAP (his first upload of 2.3.4 to experimental was in March), and Ubuntu has synced up to his latest upload and moved forward with build fixes. If it is Ubuntu's desire not to diverge too much from sid in the breezy timeframe, they really did have to merge from Debian experimental immediately after the hoary release. It doesn't seem reasonable to me to ask Ubuntu to continue shipping a fork labeled "2.3.2-whatever" for the duration of stable=sarge. If it were possible for breezy to bump shlib_dep_ver to 2.3.2.ds1-21 and hold it there, that would be great; but it looks to me like Jeff has bumped it to 2.3.4-1 for good and sufficient reason. At least, with some luck, packages compiled on sarge will run on breezy (but not vice versa without manual shlibver mangling), just as packages compiled on hoary will run on sarge (ditto). Cheers, - Michael