Re: [gentoo-dev] rfc: glibc versions prior to 2.19-r1

[Lars Wendler]

On Sun, 21 Dec 2014 09:28:48 -0600 William Hubbs wrote:

>All,
>
>the following is a comment Mike made about the status of glibc in an
>earlier thread on this list:
>
>On Sun, Aug 03, 2014 at 09:16:52AM -0400, Mike Frysinger wrote:
>> upstream glibc has dropped support for older Linux kernels.  your
>> choices:
>>  - upgrade your kernel
>>  - switch to a different C library
>>  - stick with glibc-2.19 for a while
>>
>> be warned though there are no plans atm to backport things to
>> glibc-2.19. this includes security fixes, but more importantly as
>> time moves on, making newer gcc versions sanely compile glibc.
>> we've kept older glibc versions around to be nice, and on a part
>> time basis for cross-compiling, but none of those are given
>> priority.  i.e. fixes come as people feel like doing them.
>>
>> certainly once glibc-2.20+ goes stable, there is no expectation let
>> alone requirement that packages in the tree be kept working with
>> older glibc versions.  the maintenance cost there is unreasonable.
>>
>> i guess if you're stuck on old crap, now would be a good time to
>> start preparing to unstick your crap.  glibc-2.20 will most likely
>> be in ~arch in the next 6 months.
>> -mike
>
>Since glibc-2.19-r1 is stable everywhere, what I want to know is
>whether we can remove versions *prior* to 2.19-r1 at this point.
>
>If we do, that makes it easy to fix bug 478764 [1], because there would
>only be three versions of glibc we have to worry about.
>
>thoughts?
>
>William
>
>[1] https://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=478764

+1 from me. I cannot think of any scenario where we need to keep such
old glibc versions around.

Cheers
Lars

-- 
Lars Wendler
Gentoo package maintainer
GPG: 4DD8 C47C CDFA 5295 E1A6 3FC8 F696 74AB 981C A6FC