As some of you may have seen, there's a new version of glibc in unstable. It has a couple of nice features - particularly for x86, where both i686-optimized libraries and NPTL support are included. There are also sparcv9 libraries. And the packaging has been totally redone for a number of benefits.
However, the packaging was totally redone. And the glibc version updated from CVS. I and others have been running around fixing problems relative to the version currently in unstable, so most of them have been attended to but some remain. Here's the ones I know about: Documentation missing from various packages pt_chown is missing /usr/lib/debug doesn't have some important symlinks libc6-dev's dependency on libc6 has vanished The locales package has some dependency issues and the SUPPORTED file is missing Also, problems with some non-Debian software have been reported - I believe Citrix on i386 and a JVM on ia64. Now, we need to find the problems I _don't_ know about. I'd like for those who feel comfortable testing a new glibc - usual caveats about the quality of experimental software! - to give it a try. Use it, let us know what happens. Don't upload Debian packages to the archive built against it, obviously - they won't be installable because of the >= 2.3.2.ds1 dependency in shlibs. If you have a kernel above 2.4.something, below 2.6, and an i686, you'll get i686 optimized libraries - er, I don't know if they'll work on a Via C3, I didn't check :( Probably not. If you have a kernel at least 2.6.0-test on an i486 or above, you'll get NPTL. Also, I'd like for porters to build and test this and send debian-glibc whatever patches were necessary. HPPA doesn't build yet (hi Carlos); i386, PowerPC, and S/390 will be in the archive this afternoon; sparc, ia64, alpha, and arm should be buildable; mips, mipsel, m68k, and whatever else I'm forgetting about are still up in the air. Where to get it: Experimental after dinstall today. How to build it: You'll need the linux-kernel-headers package. Get it from http://ftp-master.debian.org/~dan/. Two ways; either create a fresh chroot and install the build dependencies there (which will remove libc6-dev temporarily!) or else install all the build dependencies except linux-kernel-headers, unpack a built linux-kernel-headers .deb, export LINUX_SOURCE pointing at /usr in the unpacked linux-kernel-headers tree, and use dpkg-buildpackage -d to ignore the dependency. We're counting on your help to get this package in shape (hopefully) for sarge! -- Daniel Jacobowitz MontaVista Software Debian GNU/Linux Developer