Application developers continue to need newer versions of libraries, including core runtimes like GNU C Library (glibc), for their applications. In this article, I’ll look at some issues related to upgrading glibc in an operating system (OS) distribution, and I also encourage you to read Florian Weimer’s excellent blog post on the topic.
The problem
Deciding between a library rebase or continued backporting of commits involves a complex set of risks and rewards. For some customers and users, it is important not to rebase the library (ensuring the lowest risk of impact by change); but for others, the rebase brings valuable bug fixes (lowest risk of impact from known issues). In other cases, the newer library may perform better, even if the interfaces haven’t changed, because it can take advantage of newer hardware or a newer Linux kernel (performance advantage to first mover).
There is no way to simultaneously satisfy all the requirements of slow-moving versus fast-moving development. The recent work in Fedora Modularity is aimed at solving the root of this problem, but there is a limit to this work. The further down the stack you go, the harder the problem becomes. The potential for breakage further up the stack increases. You can’t always arbitrarily change a component’s installed version without consequences, either at build time or at runtime.
Continue reading “A platform interface for the GNU C Library”
