Re: [Synaptic-devel] glibc and synaptic

[Panu Matilainen]

On Mon, 2003-11-10 at 19:06, Henki Aarrestad wrote:
> Hi I recently downloaded synaptic for my rh8 and have to say it is
> great. However there is one thing that struck me as a bit odd. At first
> I just selected the option to upgrade everything, and while it
> downloaded the packages I saw that a new glibc version was included and
> i stopped the process as it was a major version change.(I have
> glibc2.2.* and it wanted to install glibc.2.3.*)
> 
> Wouldn't it be possible to make synaptic automatically remove the
> library from the upgrade list when the difference is major between the
> versions and only upgrade when its a minor difference in release
> numbers?
> 
> It may be that you have already have a safeguard for this in the
> program. As I said I didn't dare go through the upgrade of glibc.2.3*,
> so I don't really know what would happen.(I cannot afford to take the
> chance to crash my system to check it out)

Actually the glibc in RHL 8.0 as shipped is glibc-2.3-preXX and the
errata just takes it to glibc-2.3 final. It's safe :)

> 
> So if there are already safeguards in synaptic about this please
> disregard this post as the ramblings of a mad newbie. However if there
> are no safeguards about this please consider it as a future feature.

Both synaptic and apt will give you warning when an update would cause
all of the system become unusable (for example if core utilities were to
be removed because of an incompatible library version) - you would
certainly notice that. Even so, in case of glibc, it's (at least
supposed to be) 100% backwards compatible, just forward compatibility is
by no means promised.

        - Panu -