libc borked

Colin Watson cjwatson at ubuntu.com
Thu Mar 13 18:18:11 UTC 2008


On Thu, Mar 13, 2008 at 12:55:47PM +0100, Stephan Hermann wrote:
> The package is not at fault...
> The fault was to upload dpkg (2008-02-11 imho) with 
> https://wiki.ubuntu.com/DistCompilerFlags this in mind.
> Setting those flags is not good without a bunch of testing.

I only discovered today that wine broke a few weeks ago due to this
change, and that you applied the same kind of fix to wine last week as
has since been applied to glibc. I'm curious whether you escalated this
anywhere at the time, and if so where? If it was escalated but not dealt
with, that's something we should look at too.

> Fact, rebuilding the archive won't show any build failures, but running 
> those rebuilt apps would have shown the evilness of this change.

Rebuilding the archive against the output of the rebuild in progress
would have shown it up very quickly; note that glibc 2.7-9ubuntu2 itself
failed to build (without hand-holding) due to upgrading to libc6
2.7-9ubuntu1 at the start of the build, and many packages would have
failed in the same way.

> > I was mad. I'm human. I'm over it. Time to spend the day rebuilding 3
> > machines. ;)
> 
> Repeat with us: You should not use Development Releases on production 
> machines, until you know that it can break (badly) !

This is definitely worth noting, but it's also clearly true that
breakage should be minimised where possible. This is a reminder that the
fact that development releases are generally not actually all that bad
doesn't mean that they'll never break spectacularly, while also serving
as a demonstration of various problems in our processes.

Cheers,

-- 
Colin Watson                                       [cjwatson at ubuntu.com]




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