tlug: libwcsmbs thing

[YAMAGATA Hiroo <hiyori13@example.com>]

I guess Stephen would be writing a 2 MB post on this topic by now, but
here's my 2 yen.

Overview:
libwcsmbs is a hack for glibc2.0 to handle locales for Japanese and other
langs. It cannot coexist with glibc2.1 that RH6.0 relies on.


Historical Background:
This was required because glibc2 was supposed to handle it but didn't as of
glibc2, and X_locales that handled locales as an emergency method, has been
dropped because they figured glibc would do it.

The Japanese were really fxxcked because there was practically no locale
handling in the system. The Debian-Jp guys were issuing dirty patches to
glibc2, but you had to reapply the patch for each new version of
glibc2.0.x. This was a pain, so they developed this libwcsmbs so that it
will do the locale and wide char-multi-byte char stuff without actually
patching the glibc2 itself.  

Now, as of glibc2.1.1 (I guess), glibc started to handle locales and wide
char-multibyte char conversion stuff. The implementation is rather
controversial (or so I hear), but it does what it was supposed to do.

At this point, the role of libwcsmbs is over.  However it does not know
that, so it continues to mess with glibc2, which is causing you all the
trouble and pain.

So, you cannot, and should not, must not install libcwcsmbs under RH6.0 and
after.  It screws the core part of the system, and it will not even boot.
Not many people know this, and it is causing a lot of confusion.


Solution:
This part, I don't know. but you have to do rpm -e libwcsmbs or something
to remove the libwcsmbs BEFORE using RH6.0. If other software and rpms
demand it, I guess you might just override it. It should work in theory,
but I don't know.

Conclusion and Outlook:
Oh boy, I guess this transition to libc2.1 and above would really cause
trouble for the Japanese Linux world in the next 6 months or so. "Remove
libwcsmbs" would be easy enough, but meddling with existing rpms that
depend on it? That's beyond any everyday user.  Does rpm have a system
probing/conditional installation function? Like "Check system and keep
quiet if glibc>=2.1" or something like that? I thought not.

Poeple from Vine or Debian-Jp may not choose to move to glibc2 for a while,
but not for long. I wonder what's going to happen....



At 09:34 99/10/09 +0900, you wrote:
> Date: Fri, 8 Oct 1999 05:02:28 +0900 (JST)
> From: "Eric S. Standlee" <fwiw3980@example.com>
> Subject: tlug: Re: libwcsmbs
> 
> I installed a libwcsmbs package off the linux.or.jp ftp server and it
> killed my system.  On boot it (init?) would lock up saying something
> about an undefined variable related to libwcsmbs.  This may portray my
> lack of experience in the shared library portion of linux, but as many
> times as I tried to use the rescue disk to go in and remove the libwcsmbs
> files from /lib, /usr/lib, and some X11R6/lib directory, it popped up
> again and I ended up reinstalling RH6.0
> 
> I am baffoozled.  Any help?

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