Re: glibc 2, Linux 2.x and the world of many patches!

Mark Habersack (grendel@hoth.amu.edu.pl)
Thu, 31 Jul 1997 12:50:17 +0200 (MET DST)


On Wed, 30 Jul 1997, Teunis Peters wrote:

> > mdh> very hard ... even I've ported a few, and believe me, if I
> > mdh> can do it, anyone can do it.
> >
> > Yep, Michael is exactly right. Debian 2.0 will be fully glibc. I'm the
> > maintainer of nethack, The GIMP, and sirc, and they've all been
> > compiled just fine under glibc. The only bugs I've run into are people
> > not doing a #include <errno.h> when they really should :)
>
> <g>. Don't ferget misspelled and mistyped 'sys_errlist[]'... <sigh>.
> Just include <stdio.h>, eh? [though both variants are wrapped in __USE_BSD
> or __USE_GNU so <hrmmm>] (_sys_errlist == GNU, sys_errlist == BSD)
And also remember not to use getwd, which is deprecated, and have your static
glibc handy if you intend to use stat/lstat and the family - if you fail to
include the ld.so ld script which pulls libc.a in, then something like this:

if(foobar)
xstat = stat;
else
xstat = lstat;

will not work, gcc screaming about undefined symbols. lstat and the rest
are weak in shared glibc and are defined only in libc.a.
Also lchown always returns failure (use chown), getopt doesn't want to
keep order of the arguments (even if you set up the environment as described
in docs) - the old trick with optind doesn't work, you have to pass '+'
as the first character of short options to get the REQUIRE_ORDER behavior.

> > About half of all of the Debian packages, I believe, have been
> > converted to glibc.
>
> And I've heard that RedHat is as well, which seems to cover the really
> visible distribs. GOOD! (so no more linux-1.2 -> linux-2.0 type jumps!)
>
>
> Well - I _DID_ come into the glibc-usage quite late (2.0.4 just
> appeared)... So perhaps all that time was used productively, yes? <g>
I have just recompiled my entire system to use glibc (2.0.30, based on
Slackware 3.1, but nothing has left from this dist ;-) and had no special
problems using it. The only thing using libc5 is Netscape now ;-)

> I was just pretty frustrated at having to fix everything I use every day
> (svgalib, ipfwadm, net-tools*, pppd [which I don't need anymore :],
> pthreads, samba, all my mod players <sanity> ....)
The patches are not that huge - and they are almost always the same!