Re: 'core-updates' spring 2018

[Ricardo Wurmus]

Hi Marius,

> 'core-updates' has seen a lot of changes recently.  Some of the goodies
> include […] glibc 2.27 […]
>
> Are there other things that should go in?

I would really like to see a patch applied to glibc that ensures that
the “prlimit64” syscall is not used when running on the RHEL 6 kernel
(2.6.32).  The lack of this syscall on that kernel means that getrlimits
fails, which makes it impossible to start the JVM.

This problem appeared with the upgrade to glibc 2.26 already, and ever
since I’ve been trying to minimize the damage for RHEL 6 systems where
Guix is used as a package manager (such as the MDC).

A work-around for glibc 2.27 that makes things work fine with the RHEL 6
kernel would be very welcome!  I’ve started a branch “rhel6” where the
default glibc has been bumped back to version 2.25 but I really don’t
want it to be a long-lived branch; one of the reasons is that building
all packages for this old glibc version (even just on x86_64) puts our
build farms under extra stress that I would like to avoid.

Another thing that could go in is the new Guile wrapper for wrapped
scripts that I proposed a few months ago.  It requires a change in
build-side code to provide a “wrap-script” procedure (it wouldn’t be
used just yet).

--
Ricardo

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