Upcoming glibc 2.38 transition

[Simon Chopin]

Hi folks,

The new version of glibc is about to be released upstream in a few days, and
the upload to mantic-proposed shall follow shortly thereafter, my current
target being Friday, Aug 4st.

As usual, this will result in a massive number of autopkgtests being triggered
into the huge queues, so while this shouldn't delay most of the other triggers,
the runners will be heavily loaded, resulting in some resource-related test
failures.

If your package happens to pick up one of the new symbols from the new version,
it'll have to wait for glibc to migrate. I'll be working towards making that
happen as quickly as possible, but if you want to lend a hand, come talk to me
(schopin on IRC).

We were planning to do an archive rebuild with a snapshot, but for various
reasons this hasn't happened before I had a chance to write this email.
However, you can already test your packages against a fresh snapshot using this
PPA:

https://launchpad.net/~schopin/+archive/ubuntu/glibc-2.38-snapshot


What's new?
-----------

On the packaging side, the biggest piece of news is that we finaly managed to
merge back with Debian, after a multi-year divergence. I didn't see anything
particularly alarming in the Debian changes that we picked up.

Of particular import to us in the upstream changelog (that I'll copy below) is
the addition of the --enable-fortify-source flag, which in effect is equivalent
to `-D_FORTIFY_SOURCE=2` that we already enable for the rest of the
distribution. We've opted to enable it.
As usual with this sort of flags, it might trip some code that
was silently buggy, resulting in FTBFS.

You can find a human-readable changelog for the 2.38 release there:

https://sourceware.org/git/?p=glibc.git;a=blob_plain;f=NEWS;hb=HEAD

Cheers,
--
Simon Chopin
Foundations Team                               	    Ubuntu MOTU/Core Dev
simon.chopin at canonical.com                            schopin at ubuntu.com