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Re: glibc 2.1




On Thu, 20 May 1999, moran cohen wrote:

> i lately saw refrences to glibc 2.1 in several newsgroups.
> afaik , glibc 2.1 was removed as a result of legal conflict.
> is glibc 2.1 available again ?

Well, the note saying as much is still on the GNU site (and mirrors).
>From what I can gather, Cygnus now hosts all all Glibc development
(certainly drepper@cygnus has done all recent development on the library),
and even when the archive was originally removed, I still got it staight
off the cygnus site (ftp://sourceware.cygnus.com/pub/glibc/).

I found the following on ftp.kernel.org (and obviously all mirrors) in 
/pub/software/libs/glibc/ :

glibc-2.1.1pre3.tar.gz
glibc-linuxthreads-2.1.1pre3.tar.gz
glibc-crypt-970829.tar.gz
glibc-localedata-2.0.7pre3.tar.gz
(and .bz2)

So it certainly seems to be publically available.  If I can give some
warning...  Be VERY CAREFUL when installing Glibc2.1, and DO NOT ATTEMPT
IT IF YOU ARE NOT AN ADVANCED USER.

To emphasize, binaries compiled against Glibc 2.0.x will not necessarily
work with glibc2.1 (assuming you replace those libraries as opposed to
installing glibc2.1 in addition to them) so installing glibc2.1 could make
your system unusable.

I was very fortunate in my installation because I have a dual libc5/glibc
system, and still have alot of libc5 binaries on my system with names like
ls-libc5, cp-libc5 etc, so when all the glibc stuff stopped working, I
managed to fix some things with these old utils.

If you're replacing glibc2.0 with glibc2.1, you MIGHT (i know I did) have
to recompile anything you compiled against 2.0, including libraries.
There is no way out of this, its a structural change in the way the
library has been coded, and as per the FAQ, its an inevitable change: you
can either do it now, or later, but either way it has to happen.

[ It depends on how your system was setup at time of compile...  many of
the precompiled glibc2.0 binaries I've got off the 'net have worked fine,
and glibc2.1 certainly has been designed to be atleast partially backwards
compatible ]

So...  I'm running 2.1, and I'm really happy with it.  It was a mission to
install, but in the end I got it working.  If you aren't confident with
installing/updating essential libraries, I would NOT recommend you even
try this.  If you're an advanced user, and know what you're doing, go for
it.  Make sure you read all the docs though...  some common problems will
be documented which you are more likely than not to run into :)

Good luck :)

- Gaven

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Gaven Cohen aka Kinslayer                         http://wastelands.net/
dragon@wastelands.net                      hkp://keys.pgp.com/0x2042AD07
freelance sysadmin/programmer          linux, fantasy, female enthusiast
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