RE: [gentoo-user] Glibc and binpackages

[Laurence Perkins]

> From: John Blinka john.blinka@×××××.com<mailto:john.blinka@×××××.com>
> Sent: Friday, January 13, 2023 8:17 AM
> To: gentoo-user@l.g.o<mailto:gentoo-user@l.g.o>
> Subject: Re: [gentoo-user] Glibc and binpackages
>
>
>
> > On Thu, Jan 12, 2023 at 12:54 PM Laurence Perkins lperkins@×××××××.net<mailto:lperkins@×××××××.net> wrote:
> > I’m not sure if I’m doing something horribly wrong, or missing something blindingly obvious, but I’ve just had to boot a rescue shell yet again, so I’m going to ask.
> >
> > To save time and effort, I have my big, powerful machine create binpackages for everything when it updates, and then let all my smaller machines pull from that.  It works pretty well for the most part.
>
> I do something quite similar, but have never had a glibc problem. Maybe the problem lies in differences between the specific details of our two approaches.
>
> I have 3 boxes with different hardware but identical portage setup, identical world file, identical o.s., etc, even identical CFLAGS, CPPFLAGS and CPU_FLAGS_X86 despite different processors. Like you, I build on my fastest box (but offload work via distcc), and save binpkgs. After a world update (emerge -DuNv —changed-deps @world) , I rsync all repositories and binpkgs from the fast box to the others. An emerge -DuNv —changed-deps —usepkgonly @world on the other boxes completes the update. I do this anywhere from daily to (rarely) weekly. Portage determines when to update glibc relative to other packages. There hasn’t been a problem in years with glibc.


I suspect it's the binpkg-only bit.  I keep USE flags and python versions and so-forth the same between the different machines, but the list of installed packages is not entirely identical.

I do sync the ebuild repository from the main machine so everybody has the same package list.  But the primary goal is to avoid building huge things like webkit over and over again.  Most of the little stuff hardly matters.

glibc issues aren't exactly a regular occurrence, even when I'm being careless. It's just that when they do happen it's painful enough to make me wonder if maybe glibc version should be included in the binpackage metadata or something as an extra safeguard.



>
> I believe there are more sophisticated ways to supply updated portage trees and binary packages across a local network.  I think there are others on the list using these more sophisticated techniques successfully. Just a plain rsync satisfies my needs.
>


Oh dozens probably.  Big question is if you're happy with having a master copy on one machine and making all the modifications there, or if you need to be able to propagate changes from the clients back upstream automatically as well.



> It’s not clear to me whether you have the problem on  your big powerful machine or on your other machines. If it’s the other machines, that suggests that portage knows the proper build sequence on the big machine and somehow doesn’t on the lesser machines. Why? What’s different?


The big machine is fine.  Emerge handles everything perfectly every time if there are no binpackages involved.  It's the little machines that occasionally seem to get confuzzled.  Maybe I should try always setting --with-bdeps=y so it doesn't think it can skip things...



>
>Perhaps there’s something in my update frequency or maintaining an identical setup on all my machines that avoids the problem you’re having?
>
>If installing glibc first works, then maybe put a wrapper around your emerge? Something that installs glibc first if there’s a new binpkg then goes on to the remaining updates.


That's not a terrible idea.  Although running emerge twice every time in order to check would slow things down considerably.  Probably better to just get it through my thick head to update core libraries first.



>
>Just offered in case there’s a useful hint from my experience - not arguing that mine is the one true way (tm).
>
>HTH,
>
>John Blinka


Thanks for the info.  Gives me some things to think about.



LMP