I was originally planning to write about one of my current job tasks tonight, since that was honestly interesting for the Free Software part as well, but since I’ve received a number of comments in those regards, and even a couple of direct email messages, I think it might be a better use of my time to reply on this situation instead.

I have blogged repeatedly about the trouble caused by the new version of GLIBC (2.14) and its developers’ choice to stop allowing access to the RPC implementation that it comes with, in favour of the new, also-broken-by-the-same-update libtirpc library.

Turns out that this situation is becoming so absurd, that at least Archlinux decided to revert the removal of the RPC interface. And the same decision seems to be taken by the EGLIBC developers (which as far as I can tell, means that Debian and Ubuntu will keep the RPC interface as well). The obvious question people ask me then is “Why isn’t Gentoo doing the same?”

I’m afraid I don’t have a real answer to this: I’m not the GLIBC maintainer, that’s Mike. I’m not in his head and I honestly haven’t asked him to comment on the issue yet; the reason why I’m not pushing him for comments or actions is simple: I see no particular urge to move to the new GLIBC version. The news entries for the new release are a bit short to be of immediate interest to me, and the presence of a bug making Ruby not installable (thanks Sergei for tracking down the root cause!) makes it very low-priority to me, as in, no-priority really.

In particular, the last I knew about the EGLIBC situation, was that Mike preferred validating the applied patches by their own merit, following the upstream GLIBC developers as close as possible unless required for particular architectures and situations, which is a choice I respect deeply. The issue there seems to be that Drepper is getting more and more detached with the needs of the eco-system, and is still a sort-of dictator for what concerns the C library. I was also pointed at some suspects that he’s no longer in direct employment of RedHat, but given that I don’t really care about that I didn’t confirm or reject that; make what you want of it.

As for reverting the removal of RPC interface.. I don’t like that choice. I mean, the problem here is not that we lack a replacement for the RPC interface in GLIBC, but rather than the replacement is non-working. Rather than spend effort in working against GLIBC developers, it would be better spent to fix libtirpc so that it works with GLIBC 2.14, thus leaving us with a properly-working RPC implementation.

In particular, I think it might be a good idea now to implement the proper virtual for RPC implementations on GLIBC and other systems:

elibc_glibc? ( || ( net-libs/libtirpc <sys-libs/glibc-2.14 ) )

Using such a virtual would make it easier for me to ignore the packages that are known not working with glibc-2.14, as the dependencies wouldn’t be satisfied, and the tinderbox would then skip over the package altogether. I guess I should send an email about this so that it can be discussed and implemented.

There is another reason why I’m not so keen on restoring the interfaces that were removed from this version of the C library; while in my previous post’s comments a number of people have commented, correcting me on my first assessment that NIS was dead, it is still something that most desktops wouldn’t need, and uClibc does not implement, and finding the packages relying on said interface is still an interesting task to tackle.