On Tue, Nov 05, 2002 at 12:43:22AM +0900, Stephen J. Turnbull wrote: > Daniel> going to preserve forward compatibility, we might as well > Daniel> stop developing the library. It is absolutely impossible > Daniel> to add new functions, change the size of data structures, > Daniel> change semantics, etc. without breaking forward > Daniel> compatibility. > > Of course it's not, for the limited use I have in mind. ld -static is > your friend. Mine, anyway. I'd gladly sacrifice the 75MB it would > take to static-link everything in /bin and /sbin to the gods of > forward compatibility.
If you've been following glibc bugs lately, you'll see that's a bad idea: the thing that broke the most were static binaries, because of the pile of crap that is NSS. > Debian's glibc package isn't quite as good as upstream glibc on > backward compatibility, either. Cf libdb1-compat. That one cost me a > few hours, too (codafs passes around binary databases, dumb, but not > easily fixable, and the Debian libdb1 package was broken---had to > build from source). Ahem? You'd prefer we just stopped including libdb1 entirely and let all programs using it go to rot? That's what upstream did. We added libdb1-compat ourselves to minimize the pain of the transition, and it did. > What pisses me off is that the only way I know of to get the > transitive closure of packages that downgrading glibc will break is > dpkg -i without --force-depends, and it screwed me by attempting to > downgrade glibc. It cost most of two hours to get that system back > into service. > > Do you know of a better way? I've tried "-i --no-act" in the past, > but that doesn't work right---it never tells you about the dependency > issues. And I _needed_ a glibc 2.2.5 Debian system; it was the only > way to be sure that the change that caused unexec to break was the > glibc upgrade. > > Right now the lack of command-line dependency analysis tools is my > main complaint against Debian as a system. Hmm... you can probably get Apt to tell you but I'm not sure how. That's a good question :) -- Daniel Jacobowitz MontaVista Software Debian GNU/Linux Developer -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
