ARC rebootstrap prereq (was Re: switching ARC to 64-bit time_t )

[Aurelien Jarno]

Hi Helmut,

On 2020-08-26 17:43, Helmut Grohne wrote:
> Hi Vineet,
> 
> On Wed, Aug 26, 2020 at 02:39:53PM +0000, Vineet Gupta wrote:
> > Following up as ARC glibc port was merged upstream in 2.32. Can we now give
> > rebootstrap a spin for ARC Debian enablement.
> 
> That's great news. Unfortunately, it's not that easy yet. rebootstrap
> requires the relevant software to be packaged for Debian and the glibc
> packaging has only reached 2.31 yet. 2.32 is not even in experimental
> yet.
> 
> Trying rebootstrap with an experimental glibc is not entirely trivial,
> but possible.
> 
> Aurelien (Cced via d-glibc at l.d.o), are there plans to upload 2.32 to
> experimental anytime soon?

No it's not planned soon. glibc 2.32 has removed support for nsl and
rpc, so we first have to do the transition to their replacement. That is
libnsl, libnss-nis and libnss-nisplus for nsl, and rpcsvc-proto and
libtirpc3 for rpc. The nsl transition is in good state, but the packages
are stuck in NEW. We've started to work on the rpc transition, however
there is a lot more work, we have at least ~50 packages that FTBFS and
need to be manually patched to use libtirpc3 instead of the glibc
implementation.

We definitely need to use experimental to test those two transitions and
ask for archive rebuilds, so it's not possible to upload a 2.32 package
there.

> Alternatively, can we segregate the relevant diff between 2.31 and 2.32
> and apply it to the unstable package without bumping the version?

I don't think that's really possible, new ports introduced in version
2.32 will have all the symbol versions set to GLIBC_2.32.

Regards,
Aurelien


PS Helmut: Once libnsl, libnss-nis and libnss-nisplus are out of NEW,
you might want to see if they can be cross-built, and if that impacts
the bootstrap process as the glibc packages are going to depend on those
(in the same way as for the libxcrypt transition).

-- 
Aurelien Jarno                          GPG: 4096R/1DDD8C9B
aurelien at aurel32.net                 http://www.aurel32.net