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Date: Sun, 07 Nov 2004 04:11:36 +0100
From: Maciek Pasternacki <maciekp@...hy.fnord.org>
To: owl-users@...ts.openwall.com
Subject: Re: Owl-current moved to glibc 2.3.x

On Pungenday, The Aftermath 16, 3170 YOLD, Solar Designer wrote:

> Basically, the system has been updated to glibc 2.3.x (2.3.2 plus the
> patches found in latest Red Hat Linux 9 glibc update, minus NPTL, and
> plus all of our modifications indeed).  To do this, we had to update
> many other packages as well, including gcc, autoconf, automake,
> libtool, and gettext.  And we've updated to RPM 4.2, at the same time
[cut]

When upgrading, I noticed some inconsistencies:

One is not bumping up the release on all recompiled packages so to
upgrade packages I had to give --force option to rpm; if it didn't
break dependencies, it wouldn't be such a big issue (although it's not
elegant when e.g. ed-0.2-owl22 installed on system is compiled with
gcc-2.95 on glibc-2.1.3 and ed-0.2-owl22.i386.rpm in Owl-current is
compiled with gcc-3.2.2 on glibc-2.3.2), but it does break them;
a number of packages that depend on openssl (e.g. elinks) are recompiled
with new version of openssl but their release didn't change, so
elinks-0.9.1-owl4 installed on system conflicts with new openssl
package and elinks-0.9.1-owl4 in Owl-current conflicts with old one
and I have to upgrade packages with --force because rpm doesn't see
difference between these two packages.

This is one more upside of using rpm helper such as poldek -- poldek
can be used to find such inconsistencies in automated way.  Currently
poldek doesn't compile OOTB on Owl because of some autotools magic not
detecting librpm correctly; as soon as I'll get my system completely
up and running I'll track this down with poldek developers.

Second inconsistency is /usr/lib/rpm/macros -- default cpu is now
i686; since I run i586 system, I was surprised by rpmbuild creating
i686 binaries for me (even more surprised by it running
i686-pc-linux-gnu compiler and saving resulting binaries as .i386.rpm
files).  Are binaries in -current also compiled for i686-pc-linux-gnu?
Why such change?  Or maybe I don't understand some details about
compiling for different flavours of x86?

Also, the way of upgrading RPM is bothersome (or I misunderstood
message from RPM package's upgrade script).  Not only I had to unpack
rpm with rpm2cpio on / on live system (it didn't work when unpacked
into subdirectory; then I had to unpack also popt, on which rpm
depends, this way, in order to upgrade rpm package), then I found my /
directory with mode 0700 (thaks to Owl's default umask) -- I was quite
surprised when I typed `ls' as user and saw `bash: ls: command not
found'.  Well, I managed to fix everything after all (after surviving
Slackware upgrades it wasn't even that hard) ;) but I think this
should be fixed somehow while stabilising -current to a numbered
release (or, at least, rpm %pre script could be more informative,
maybe even print exact shell commands to convert the database without
doing too much harm to the system).

I'm not trying to complain at Owl -- I know I'm running a testing
bleeding-edge -current release (OTOH compared to other distributions
in Owl bleeding-edge means `rock stable' and stable is more like
`mountain stable') and I'm trying to test it and give feedback as much
as I can while using it as a mere end user.  I waited long for this
upgrade -- it was very inconvenient to work around old glibc or
autotools in third-party programs and I'm really glad to see Owl with
more recent libraries and devel tools.  Thanks for the great distro
and keep up the good work. :)

As soon as I get everything to work I'll update my packages at
http://leeloo.moo.pl/srpms/ to current versions of programs with specs
compiling cleanly on current Owl (in case anyone except me actually
uses them).

Greets,
		--japhy

-- 
__    Maciek Pasternacki <maciekp@...hy.fnord.org> [ http://japhy.fnord.org/ ]
`| _   |_\  / { The question is: what is a Mahnamahna?
,|{-}|}| }\/                                   The question is: who cares? }
\/   |____/                                              ( The Muppets )  -><-

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