Updating glibc - from source, cont'd
 

My first effort toward updating glibc from source did not ... :cry: ... go well... although my emergency-recovery arrangements for that eventuality did. :cool:

Which leads me back to, what did I do wrong? :study:

The show-stopping problem was init. This process, somewhat to my surprise and chagrin, isn't statically linked, and everything came a'crashing down when it couldn't make the connection to the new library.

Questions...

(1) Is it correct to configure glibc with --prefix=/usr or is it usually configured with [i]--prefix=/[/] ?

(2) Is it advisable, or even worth-considering, to install into a separate directory, i.e. off of /usr/lib/whatever, and include this in /etc/ld.so.conf? Basically, the idea being that the "old" libraries found in /lib and /usr/lib would be permanently "hidden from view."

(3) I would like for init to be statically linked, but where is it? (Oh nevermind... sysvinit...) Anyhow, it puzzles me greatly that it encountered something so drastically-different between the older and the newer glibc that it could not work with both. :study: ... :scratch: ...

"Experience is the best teacher, but it's hell on your (dwindling... :cry: ) hair supply." :D

Now this surprised me!

I tried compiling sysvinit-2.86 from source with make LDFLAGS="-s -static" and got this message several times: (The same message appearing in reference to other routines as well, such as getgrnam, getgrdid...)

I certainly would have expected such a dependency or requirement not to exist anywhere. "Either the library references are static, I would have thought, or they are dynamic."

Furthermore, when I tested the results of a static-compile (aforementioned) with ldd, the results were not happy at all. Only a regular, dynamic-linked make was at all acceptable. So it does not seem that the sysvinit source can be compiled without dependency upon a runtime library. :jawa: