Messages in this thread |  | | | Date | Sat, 13 Jun 1998 23:02:07 -0400 (EDT) | | From | "Richard B. Johnson" <> | | Subject | Re: OFFTOPIC: e2fsprogs and +2Gb partitions |
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On 12 Jun 1998, Ulrich Drepper wrote:
> alan@lxorguk.ukuu.org.uk (Alan Cox) writes: > > > You are without a doubt wrong to have not included as close to full > > libc5 compatibility for -D_LINUX_SOURCE. > > Following this path would for ever manifested that software written on > Linux is not portable. This always was wrong, all the hacks necessary > to run software written are damaging. You certainly don't want to > tell me that living with -D_LINUX_SOURCE is better than living without > -D_LINUX_SOURCE after a phase of adaption, do you? > I can shut up no longer. I __HAD__ all the sources for all the programs and utilities that ran on this system. All of the programs and utilities that ran on this system were compiled on this system. I did not start with a 'standard' distribution. I started with Version 0.99 obtained on floppies from Yggdarsil (or however you spell it).
I installed glibc and now I have nothing. No sources except the kernel will compile.
I obtained a 'standard' distribution from a CDROM and installed it on another system. Sources provided on that CDROM will not compile with the tools provided with that distribution. This is because that distribution had glibc.
I can't even compile a new version of ld.so to get rid of the startup error message caused by glibc's putting a TEXT file instead of a shared library.
It will probably be years before there are any Linux distributions that will compile the sources for the binaries provided by these distributions.
This is not how migration should have occurred. New tools should have at least emulated the capabilities of the older tools. This was not done. The result is a lot of angry developers.
I am surprised that Alan is just discovering how awful the situation is. POSIX compliance is only ONE of the objectives of a 'C' runtime library. There are many others, primarily usefulness.
Cheers, Dick Johnson ***** FILE SYSTEM MODIFIED ***** Penguin : Linux version 2.1.105 on an i586 machine (66.15 BogoMips). Warning : It's hard to remain at the trailing edge of technology.
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