Subject: [bug#30873] [PATCH core-updates 1/3] gnu: glibc: Update to 2.27.

From: [email-masked] (Ludovic Courtès)
Date: Wed, 21 Mar 2018 19:26:25 +0100

Heya Marius!

Marius Bakke <[email-masked]> skribis:

> There are actually not a lot of high severity fixes in 2.27 yet.  I
> opted for this mostly as a proof-of-concept for a couple of reasons.

Good.  :-)

> The question is which do we pick?  Portability fixes for arches we don't
> (yet) support?  Some of the locale fixes seem genuine, and not just
> typos, e.g.:
>
> * https://sourceware.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=22517
> * https://sourceware.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=22848

[...]

> But, we risk missing important commits this way, and may cause headaches
> for people wanting to port Guix to a new architecture.  And the approach
> doesn't really scale for branches approaching ~100 commits.
>
> Regardless, here is a patch with just the above commits.  Let me know if
> you spot others in the history that look important.  WDYT?

“Which ones do we pick” summarizes the problem, I think.  It’s
upstream’s job to pick a set of changes and declare a new release.  It
seems to me that we’re kinda doing the glibc release manager’s job here,
except we lack insight compared to them: it’s harder for us to judge
which changes are critical, which changes are just the beginning of
broader modifications/fixes, etc.

I’d be willing to just use upstream’s release.  It has bugs, no doubts,
but the next release will have its own bugs too.  :-)  Furthermore,
SONAMEs and symbol versioning is quite critical, but it’s usually done
under the assumption that people use releases, not intermediate
snapshots.

I understand that glibc’s 2.27 branch is stable, contains nothing but
bug fixes, and in that sense is rather safe.  Still…

WDYT?

BTW, what about emailing the libc people to add you to the list of
distro maintainers at <https://sourceware.org/glibc/wiki/MAINTAINERS>?
I think it could be useful.

Thanks!

Ludo’.