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

[William Hubbs]

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