Debian switching back to Glibc [LWN.net]

Aurelien Jarmo reports that the Debian Project is switching back to the GNU C Library and will no longer ship the EGLIBC fork. The reason is simple: the changes in the Glibc project mean that EGLIBC is no longer needed and is no longer under development. "This has resulted in a much more friendly development based on team work with good cooperation. The development is now based on peer review, which results in less buggy code (humans do make mistakes). It has also resulted in things that were clearly impossible before, like using the same repository for all architectures, and even getting rid of the ports/ directory."

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Debian switching back to Glibc

Posted Jun 19, 2014 17:31 UTC (Thu) by JoeBuck (subscriber, #2330) [Link] (5 responses)

eglibc no longer exists as a separate project; everything has been merged back. It's worked out exactly the same way egcs did: a fork was started because of problems in the management of the original project, but was done in way that would allow a subsequent remerge once the problems that motivated the original fork were worked out.

This only works where the fork follows the same processes for contributions as the original project, so that they can be freely merged back. When this isn't done (for example, with xemacs) there's no way to heal the fork.

Debian switching back to Glibc

Posted Jun 19, 2014 18:16 UTC (Thu) by pabs (subscriber, #43278) [Link] (4 responses)

Not everything was merged back (nor will be) and Debian is now carrying patches for those things.

Debian switching back to Glibc

Posted Jun 20, 2014 0:58 UTC (Fri) by voltagex (guest, #86296) [Link] (2 responses)

Hey pabs,

How do distro-specific patched libcs affect programs? If I write something expecting Debian's patched glibc and then try to run it on Fedora, what happens?

Debian switching back to Glibc

Posted Jun 20, 2014 10:21 UTC (Fri) by ballombe (subscriber, #9523) [Link]

http://blog.aurel32.net/175 give the list of patches.
Only one is relevant:
Dynamic reload of /etc/resolv.conf

But anyway, Debian and Fedora are running different kernel and glibc versions.

Debian switching back to Glibc

Posted Jun 23, 2014 21:10 UTC (Mon) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link]

Given that anything serious along those lines will break compatibility across most distros, I would simply assume that distro patches are pretty much all bug-fixes that have passed distro QA, but have not yet been merged upstream. (Or a bug-fix reversion because the fix breaks some program in that version of the distro.)

Okay, that's probably not 100% true, but if it's not a pretty safe working assumption, there's something badly broken in the distro system somewhere.

Cheers,
Wol

Debian switching back to Glibc

Posted Jun 20, 2014 6:42 UTC (Fri) by JoeBuck (subscriber, #2330) [Link]

Not everything has been merged back, but it appears that most of the rest will be merged, or redone to provide equivalent functionality.