Fri, 23 Mar 2007
Etch and glibc
Thomas mentions that Etch will release with glibc 2.3 rather than glibc 2.4, and wonders why that is.
There are two simple reasons for this:
- AIUI, glibc 2.4 drops support for non-NPTL kernels (i.e., 2.4 and earlier Linux kernels). Since sarge's default kernel was still a 2.4-based kernel, upgrading to a glibc 2.4 will immediately break everything on your system, since at that point your libc suddenly refuses to cooperate with your kernel. Not providing an upgrade path for users who run a supported kernel of our previous release is not an option.
- Etch will have official support for 11 architectures: i486 and later intel-compatibles, SPARC, Alpha, PowerPC, ARM, big- and little-endian MIPS, PARISC, ia64, S/390 and AMD64. If we want to migrate to glibc 2.4 or later and still release, then it has to work on all those architectures. Since NPTL requires some architecture-specific support and since that architecture-specific support is not available for some of our current architectures, this is not the case (also see the above). It may be possible that Debian "lenny" will drop some architectures because the most recent version of glibc still does not support them, but ultimately that decision will be up to the release managers.
So, while I'll agree that it kindof sucks that Debian will release with a somewhat outdated version of glibc, it's not as if there isn't a valid reason.
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