This is the heart of the problem

Posted Feb 13, 2014 20:55 UTC (Thu) by dlang (guest, #313)
In reply to: This is the heart of the problem by Cyberax
Parent article: The Debian technical committee vote concludes

> It's easier to install a complete OS in a chroot at that point.

This is your answer to the RHEL 5 question above. glibc is the least of your worries, every other library you use is a problem as well.

the thing is that you don't have to do this for every distro you want to use, you just do it for the oldest one and newer ones almost always work.

this is backwards compatibility of the systems, things build for older systems keep working on newer systems.

I know that you praise the ability of the windows monoculture to set a flag and have the resulting binary work for that old version, but with multiple competing vendors it's not that easy to point at an arbitrary 'old' version of some other companies work.

This is the heart of the problem

Posted Feb 13, 2014 21:26 UTC (Thu) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link] (2 responses)

I can realistically avoid using every other library or in a pinch simply package them along with my application.

But not glibc. It can't be packaged or avoided.

This is the heart of the problem

Posted Feb 16, 2014 2:55 UTC (Sun) by dlang (guest, #313) [Link] (1 responses)

sure you can. It may not be trivial, but there are several other libc implementations, and some people do use them instead of glibc

but even if you use glibc, the glibc developers can't implement policy in your apps by implementing some new function, they can only do it if they change an existing function.

so while they can break or change something they currently do, they can't take over other functions at a whim

This is the heart of the problem

Posted Feb 16, 2014 5:11 UTC (Sun) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link]

Nope. It sounds easy but when you try to mix uclibc and glibc things go downhill. Fast. And it's extremely easy to pull in glibc accidentally. By depending on libgl, for example.