[SOLVED] Upgrading glibc in current: what I did and what should I have done?

hazel · 03-18-2021, 06:31 AM

This is not a story about a disaster, merely a mild annoyance. But I do feel that I missed a trick somewhere and hope someone here will tell me what I should have done.

I have a partial Slackware-current system on /dev/sda10, which I regard as my new Slackware-15. I installed glibc-multilib on it because I will eventually need 32-bit glibc for my printer. I have the multilib repo uncommented in slackpkgplus.conf and I also have glibc blacklisted because I hoped this would force slackpkg to use the multilib version for updating (which turned out not to be the case).

Early this morning I did a monthly update and noticed that this included glibc. I've never had to do a glibc update in Slackware before (I assume it never happens in a release version) and so I was ultra-cautious. I unchecked glibc and did the update without it.

Then I ran slackpkg upgrade-all again. The ncurses interface now showed only one package, the normal glibc. At the bottom I could see a line of text with two packages named: glibc and glibc-multilib. Obviously it was the second one I wanted but only the first showed up in ncurses. So I said yes and it upgraded smoothly but my multilib setup is gone. Not that that's a problem; I'll reinstall it down the line when we finally have a stable release. But obviously I did something wrong because I didn't get the result I really wanted. So what should I have done?

allend · 03-18-2021, 06:53 AM

I suspect you may have been caught by the new slackpkg blacklist behaviour.

Quote:

Mon Feb 8 05:13:26 UTC 2021
...
ap/slackpkg-15.0-noarch-1.txz: Upgraded.
These are some of the important changes (see the ChangeLog for more):
Note that this slackpkg release contains a backwards-incompatible change to
the blacklisting syntax (e.g. glibc ---> glibc-*). This changes the prior
behavior of the blacklist function; previously, adding "glibc" to the
blacklist would cause glibc, glibc-profile, glibc-zoneinfo, et al to be
ignored by slackpkg. The new behavior is that *only* the glibc package is
ignored. If you want to blacklist all packages whose names begin with glibc,
you would need to add "glibc.*" to the blacklist now. Also note that any
special characters, e.g. "+", will need to be escaped in the blacklist file.
To blacklist entire package sets, a trailing slash is now required: e.g. kde/
Another backwards-incompatibility warning: check-updates will now return 1 if
there are updates available - this will make it easier to use this feature
with cron (thanks to Peter Hyman).
Added support for Slackware-AArch64 (thanks to Stuart Winter).
Added aaa_glibc-solibs and aaa_libraries to the "do these first" routine.
Thanks to Robby Workman for the new slackpkg release!

hazel · 03-18-2021, 07:15 AM

Quote:

This changes the prior behavior of the blacklist function; previously, adding "glibc" to the blacklist would cause glibc, glibc-profile, glibc-zoneinfo, et al to be
ignored by slackpkg. The new behavior is that *only* the glibc package is
ignored. If you want to blacklist all packages whose names begin with glibc,
you would need to add "glibc.*" to the blacklist now.

That would cause further hiccups, I think, and I shall certainly edit that file. But according to the above, glibc itself should have been blacklisted even with the old syntax. And it clearly wasn't.

Also I should like to know why only glibc appeared in the interactive part of the display when slackpkg clearly was aware of the glibc-multilib package as fulfilling the requirement.

PS: I think I know now what I did wrong. I've just checked the configuration file again; it was a new one because slackpkg+ itself got updated, and I edited it by hand afterwards but I think I didn't complete the edit. I uncommented the multilib repo but forgot to add it to REPOPLUS.

Funny how posing a question here clears the mind!

allend · 03-18-2021, 07:57 AM

The act of writing does force you to order your thoughts.

chrisretusn · 03-18-2021, 07:59 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by hazel

I have a partial Slackware-current system on /dev/sda10, which I regard as my new Slackware-15. I installed glibc multilib on it because I will eventually need 32-bit glibc for my printer. I have the multilib repo uncommented in slackpkgplus.conf and I also have glibc blacklisted because I hoped this would force slackpkg to use the multilib version for updating (which turned out not to be the case).

Since I have no idea what you have installed with this partial install, kind of hard to say. When you say installed glib multilib I am going with you installed these packages:

aaa_glibc-solibs-2.33_multilib-x86_64-1alien
glibc-2.33_multilib-x86_64-1alien
glibc-i18n-2.33_multilib-x86_64-1alien
glibc-profile-2.33_multilib-x86_64-1alien

I would not have blacklisted glibc and let slackpkg+ handle those packages.

I run with the full set of multilib except for the gcc set as I have no plans to compile 32-bit on this computer.

This is my slackpkgplus.conf (applicable sections).

Code:

PKGS_PRIORITY=( slackware64:id3lib ) # 2018-01-09, also in alienbob
PKGS_PRIORITY+=( slackware64:gcc ) # 2020-09-17, give slackware packages priority over multilib.
PKGS_PRIORITY+=( nonslack )
PKGS_PRIORITY+=( slackpkgplus multilib restricted alienbob )
REPOPLUS=( nonslack )
REPOPLUS+=( slackpkgplus multilib restricted alienbob )
MIRRORPLUS['slackpkgplus']=http://slakfinder.org/slackpkg+dev/
MIRRORPLUS['nonslack']=file://home/non-slack/slackbuilds/
MIRRORPLUS['multilib']=https://bear.alienbase.nl/mirrors/people/alien/multilib/current/
MIRRORPLUS['alienbob']=https://bear.alienbase.nl/mirrors/people/alien/sbrepos/current/x86_64/
MIRRORPLUS['restricted']=https://bear.alienbase.nl/mirrors/people/alien/restricted_sbrepos/current/x86_64/

I actually use "file://" for multilib, alienbob and restricted that points to a local mirror on my LAN.

Code:

MIRRORPLUS['multilib']=file://home/non-slack/multilib/current/
MIRRORPLUS['alienbob']=file://home/non-slack/alienbob/current/x86_64/
MIRRORPLUS['restricted']=file://home/non-slack/alienbob_restricted/current/x86_64/

chrisretusn · 03-18-2021, 08:00 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by hazel

PS: I think I know now what I did wrong. I've just checked the configuration file again; it was a new one because slackpkg+ itself got updated, and I edited it by hand afterwards but I think I didn't complete the edit. I uncommented the multilib repo but forgot to add it to REPOPLUS.

Funny how posing a question here clears the mind!

Saw this after I posted.

enorbet · 03-18-2021, 12:25 PM

Slackpkg and Slackpkg have wone me over from my default suspicions about automation, but I do wish there was a less cavalier attitude about replacing configuration files needlessly. Having to repeatedly revert to the same configuration manually when no substantive change was made is just busy work and a bit silly not to mention disrespectful. This too is a minor issue but I don't see any justification. It creates errors and extra work needlessly.

hazel · 03-18-2021, 12:46 PM

Having done some configuration edits, I'm going to mark this tentatively as solved. If I get further problems down the line, I can always unsolve it again.

hazel · 03-19-2021, 11:57 AM

Yes, it's fixed. Multilib showing up normally now. Thanks a lot!

chrisretusn · 03-19-2021, 09:02 PM

Good to hear/