4 ms·
The glibc upgrade which was painful (and essentially required recompiling everything) was much further back than 10 years. I think I was running LFS at the time
by cycomanic 4y ago
The glibc upgrade which was painful (and essentially required recompiling everything) was much further back than 10 years. I think I was running LFS at the time, but recall it was painful for all distros. I don't think there was a glibc upgrade that was disruptive since then. There was the introduction of multi arch on Debian some years back which caused a bit of disruption (I was running Debian unstable at the time IIRC), but pretty much everything else has been very minor since then. I've been running arch for 2 years or so now, before I was running tumbleweed. I have to say that rolling releases have been much less eventful in general than release based distros (I administer my partners Ubuntu laptop and lts upgrades are a bit more disruptive).
- entropicdrifter 4y agoThe current glibc version broke Easy AntiCheat support for Proton games, but that's the only break of note in recent memory, and it only affects people playing multiplayer games on Linux, which is a minority (multiplayer gamers) of a minority (Linux gamers) of a minority (Linux users).
- WfAjWDYpDHDYCN5 4y agoglibc updates have recently broken lots of Electron software (and probably other stuff using similar sandboxing), by using a new syscall (clone3? or something) to implement some library methods. Pretty much every glibc update breaks something, honestly.
- LukeShu 4y agoThat breakage is because of the dumpster-fire that is seccomp. Your seccomp policy (in this case, the one that comes with Electron) whitelists syscalls, but which syscalls glibc uses to implement things is considered an implementation detail, not part of the contract. So seccomp was designed in a way that makes it broken-by-design with the most popular libc.
- yjftsjthsd-h 4y ago> The glibc upgrade which was painful (and essentially required recompiling everything) was much further back than 10 years. Ah. I'm old. Somehow traumatic glibc upgrades were not how I expected to find out.
- LukeShu 4y agoIn Arch, the glibc package upgrade associated with the `/lib` + `/usr/lib` merge in 2012ish was painful. I assume that's what the parent post was referring to. I assume you're referring to the libc5→libc6 upgrade?
- Macha 4y agoHmm, I remember UsrMerge being a non-event from a user POV. The official instructions seem quite short too: https://archlinux.org/news/the-lib-directory-becomes-a-symlink/ https://archlinux.org/news/the-lib-directory-becomes-a-symli...
- LukeShu 4y agoFor many users it was a non-event; but if you missed that news post, and didn't pass `--ignore glibc` to your `-Syu`, then your system broke. And a sizable minority of users missed the news post. (Shamefully, I was in that minority.)
- Semaphor 4y agoI like my pacman helper, pikaur [0]. Not only does it allow me to edit/view changed AUR files, it also alerts me whenever there is archlinux.org news [0]: https://github.com/actionless/pikaur https://github.com/actionless/pikaur
- bavell 4y agoLove pikaur, been happily using it for years.
- cycomanic 4y agoYes I think you're correct libc5 to libc6 is the upgrade I was talking about. I just had a look that's more than 20 years ago. Funny how people still talk about "painful libc upgrades".
- asveikau 4y ago
- xorcist 4y agoThe a.out -> ELF migration had some sharp edges, too, but that was before Ubuntu and Arch.