libc update progress?

Joerg Sonnenberger joerg at britannica.bec.de
Sun May 1 12:42:46 PDT 2005


On Sat, Apr 30, 2005 at 03:48:54PM -0700, Matthew Dillon wrote:
>     We are shifting to a new major library rev but there's no reason to
>     make life difficult for people during the transition.  The CVS tree
>     is the right place to put this and that's what I am going to do
>     right now.

The main reason why I don't like having it as blobs in the CVS tree is
the same situation FreeBSD faced often enough: What happens if we find
a big security flaw e.g. in libc (hello, realpath)? We can fix the
old libc, rebuild it and put the fixed version up as new package. Sure,
we could add it also the CVS repo, but that adds bloat.

The use of the CVS version will be greatly going down over the time,
but the bloat persist. I suggested installing it by default or
untarring it as part of the ISO build, because that catches the single
critical case: new installation wanting to use old packages. If you
do a make world on an existing machine, it doesn't touch the old libc
at all. Read: it is there, the same version everything else was built
against. If someone accidently / intentionally removes the installed
libs, he could still fetch the package, just as if you would have
installed it from a new ISO.

Joerg





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