Re: [gentoo-user] How safe is it to change vanilla-USE-Flag in glibc?

[Franz Fellner]

On Wed, 06 Jul 2016 11:19:44 -0400, Michael Orlitzky <mjo@g.o> wrote:
> On 07/06/2016 03:17 AM, Franz Fellner wrote:
> > Hey all,
> >
> > I have issues with some prgrams eating too much memory. This seems to be related to glibc not trimming as necessary which results in way too much memory still occupied by the program after free()ing memory.
> > I can't use gcc (specifically g++) with quite some apps now because it starts collecting memory (+swap) until everything falls apart, and I finally came to the conclusion also gcc might suffer from bad trimming behaviour.
> > As glibc is the package that implements free I want to have a closer look at it. The first idea is to get rid of Gentoo patches which are controlled by USE="vanilla". Playing around with glibc might destroy my system. Downgrades are already unsupported. So my question:
> >
> > Can I safely switch from -vanilla to +vanilla in glibc?
> >
>
> It looks to me like USE=vanilla controls only whether or not bundled
> timezone data is used. If that's the case (double-check!), it's probably
> safe to unmerge timezone-data and re-emerge glibc with USE=vanilla.

There is a huge glibc-2.23-patches-4.tar.bz2 in my DISTDIR and the patches get applied.

> To be safe, you can bundle up your existing glibc with quickpkg. Then if
> something goes wrong, you can always boot to a liveCD and unpack the old
> version.

Yes, I know that works ;) But I don't have any livecd around (and most likely not even an empty disc, at least it's not therewhere it should be) so it is extra work I could avoid if a DEV gives me the OK regarding USE=vanilla.

Thx
Franz