GHC folks,
I'm slightly disturbed that there hasn't been much noise on this list
concerning ghc and Linux/glibc versioning problems. We've had no end of
trouble here with incompatibilites between glibc 2.0 and 2.1 - although
programs built on the former appear to be forward-compatible, strange
problems crop up later on. Backwards compatibiltiy is more of a no-no:
things tend to crash much earlier. Furthermore, there appear to be quite
serious bugs in the stdio implementation in both glibcs.
The forward-compatibility problems are well-documented:
http://sourceware.cygnus.com/glibc/glibc-faq.html#s-2.27
my understanding of this is that since we compiled libHSrts.a, libHS.a and
libHScbits.a against the old glibc 2.0, they won't work properly with glibc
2.1.
While I could moan for ages about why this meant they should have changed
the shared library version number between glibc 2.1 and glibc 2.0 (what are
shared library version numbers for anyway?), that won't get us anywhere.
We at GHC HQ have just upgraded our remaining glibc 2.0 machine here to
glibc 2.1, so at least we'll have fewer compatibility problems. But that
means we won't be able to build glibc 2.0 binaries from now on: is this
going to cause anyone severe grief?
Since the linux binaries on the web page, advertised as glibc2.0/2.1, don't
actually work very well on 2.1, I'm putting together a 2.1-friendly dist
right now.
Cheers,
Simon
