lkml.org 
[lkml]   [2005]   [Jan]   [24]   [last100]   RSS Feed
Views: [wrap][no wrap]   [headers]  [forward] 
 
Messages in this thread
/
Date
From
Subjectforestalling GNU incompatibility - proposal for binary relative dynamic linking
hey all,

Forgive the crosspost in advance, but I had an idea that touched many
areas, and would need input from multiple groups associated with the
gnu build chain, and perhaps the kernel itself.

After spending *two weeks* on various ways of building glibc,
I'm convinced that the gnu/linux toolchain is in great danger of
losing interoperability.

The main problem is that the glibc's supplied with each commercial
system are *heavily* patched. My Suse 9.2 system has a rpm for
glibc with fifty patches. Fifty patches!

Fifty patches which make the SuSE glibc binarily incompatible
with the redhat, and so on. And everything is incompatible
with the vanilla flavor.

All this makes me very skeptical that I'm ever going to get
to a 'standard' out of the box glibc build. I build a standard
glibc, and then all the supplied programs that come with SuSE
break. And each vendor has the same problem - new that they are
stuck with a heavily patched glibc, what chance do *they* have
of getting back to a standard with the need to have old programs
still work with the upgrades?









What IMO is desperately needed is a backwards compatibility
hack or hacks. And of course the will of the different linux
distribution providers to migrate back to the standard gnu
toolchain.

Below is such a hack that lets providers do this, and
solves quite a few problems in the process - the basic problem
being that one currently can't get from a nonstandard glibc to
a standard one without quite a bit of pain - for migrating back
breaks all the legacy binaries out there.


What is needed is the ability to reference multiple versions of the
glibc WITHOUT changing my environment to do so.


Ie: If I set up my LD_LIBRARY_PATH to reference:

setenv LD_LIBRARY_PATH /system/path/to/libc:.....


then the SuSE executables work fine but my new executables break,
and if I set up my LD_LIBRARY_PATH to reference:

setenv LD_LIBRARY_PATH /new/path/to/libc:.....

then my new executables work, but my *old* executables break.


What I'd like to do is be able to set up my LD_LIBRARY_PATH
so that I can reference it from the point of view of the
*executable*:

setenv LD_LIBRARY_PATH "*/../lib:....."




Here, read "* == full path of dirname of executable".

So if gcc was installed in say, "/opt/tools/bin/gcc",
LD_LIBRARY_PATH would become at runtime "/opt/tools/bin/../lib"
or "/opt/tools/lib". And hence if I had a libc.so installed
there, it would pick it up and use it.



Anyways, I have no idea whether or not this idea is being considered
or has been considered in the past, but AFAICT it would save me the
trouble of having hundreds of wrapper scripts. And I would like to
get an idea of what adding something like this to the gnu toolset would
require. Discussion is welcome..


Ed
-
To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in
the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org
More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/

\
 
 \ /
  Last update: 2005-03-22 14:09    [W:0.084 / U:0.876 seconds]
©2003-2020 Jasper Spaans|hosted at Digital Ocean and TransIP|Read the blog|Advertise on this site