Re: tlug: forwarded message from Hajime Saitou

["Stephen J. Turnbull" <turnbull@example.com>]

>>>>> "Chris" == Christopher Wiles <wileyc@example.com> writes:

    Chris> On Sat, 11 Oct 1997, Stephen J. Turnbull wrote:
    >> hamm is, yes, but when did X start running with libc6?  when I
    >> checked, oh, about 2 months ago, you needed the

    Chris> We've been providing glibc XFree86 binaries since 3.3.

Whenever that was.  Anyway, time flies; I can't tell exactly when I
last played with that system, but it looks to be about June 28.  Sorry 
'bout that.

Re: pgcc - current reports on xemacs-beta are still mixed, but lots
more successes than there used to be....

    Chris>   This has caused no end of trouble (the docs clearly state
    Chris> that "these binaries need glibc-2.0 or better.  If you
    Chris> don't know what that is, these binaries are not for you."
    Chris> Unfortunately, users never read docs).

I do.  I tried upgrading on a machine with NO user data.  When that
didn't work, I tried backing out.  When that didn't work, I
reformatted the disk (can't do that if there's user data there :-) and
installed plain hamm.  But at the time, it didn't include X ...  It
does now.  Thanks to you (as one of "we") and Hajime for drawing my
attention to the vast progress made by hamm in recent weeks.  (BTW, it 
was bloody hard to get dpkg-ftp to download hamm.  But I figured it
out.  Dunnet experience came in handy ;-)

Docs or no docs, people are going to try to upgrade to the latest and
greatest.  I don't know what The Answer[tm] is, but I think it was a
mistake to link hamm to unstable.

That is, I had no major problems with anything from bo when it was
unstable.  I had binaries that didn't work, I had scripts that
couldn't find their interpreters (because the package dependencies
weren't right), but there were no packages that if installed broke
other packages.  (Trying to install one of the new glibc-based tk/tcl
packages completely broke all of them because dselect got completely
confused and wouldn't DTRT no matter what, and I couldn't make head
nor tail of the dependencies to do it by hand; I think it was an
undirected infinitely cyclic graph....)

A incompatible major new revision of the main library is a completely
different kettle of fish.  I got burned mildly badly by JE way back
when---they had a patched libc but didn't explain how to run ldconfig
after you installed it.  (That was supposed to be done by their
installation program which was an incredible time-wasting losing
crock, so I ignored it.)  Of course, my system was not bootable.  (Of
course in a teleological sense, not a technical sense.)  Fortunately,
even then I was paranoid; I had an image of my original root partition
in a tar file, so I restored that and recovered the original state.

There ought to be a separate category from UNSTABLE = "don't expect us
to hold your hand if this package doesn't work".  Maybe DEVEL = " you
probably shouldn't install this if you can't reproduce the kernel code
from memory, because you may have to" ;-)
Next TLUG meeting is Saturday Dec. 13, 1997  (possibly Nov. 13?)
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