The joy of updates

Glibc-2.8 and gcc-4.3.1 were let loose on ~arch the other day, and this —as expected— caused some fuss. While gcc-4.3.0 had been sitting in p.mask, a lot of packages were tested and patches were applied, so this did not cause too much trouble. You can check bug 198121 to see that many issues are resolved, but a few remain open at this time. (The obpager one reported by me.)

We had no such advance warning for glibc-2.8 though, and this is more troubling because there is no going back after upgrading glibc. Fortunately there were not many issues, as can be seen in the tracker bug, with 12 of the 23 reported now fixed. I myself ran into netkit-rsh, consolekit, acpid and gamin. I got the go-ahead to commit the gamin fix proposed in the bugreport, so that one is taken care of. The other three I mentioned are still unresolved, although fixes do exist. I have therefore committed these fixes to berkano overlay, until the maintainers find the time and inclination to fix these packages properly.

Another, but more troublesome update was pixman-0.11.4. Seems innocent enough on the face of it, but it resulted in Xorg leaking humongous amounts of memory, eventually crashing, because the kernel would kill the out-of-memory process. Luckily I ran into someone on #gentoo who had pinned down pixman as the culprit, so I could do a quick downgrade. In the meantime the bug has been fixed, so the pixman upgrade is now safe.

And then there is also libtool-2.2, which has been let loose on ~arch a couple of times before, but been remasked because of too many bugs cropping up. There are still some packages not working with libtool-2.2, such as evince, proftpd and courier-imap. So if you use any of the apps that have a problem with this version, you would probably want to put =sys-devel/libtool-2.2* in your package.mask. Personally, I have updated, because all the issues that touched me are fixed.

While not strictly necessary, I did an emerge -e system && emerge -e world. And with the issues I ran into fixed, I am now content with a freshly updated and consistent ~x86 desktop system. (I had to "downgrade" my amd64 system earlier because ndiswrapper refused to work with 64-bits drivers, and I need wifi.)

And you? Did you have any interesting adventures with these updates? Is there anything still broken for you, or anything you would have liked advance warning about? Let's hear it!

13 Jun 08 - 00:47 | , and | 14 Comments

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