ppc situation

["Jack Howarth" <howarth at nitro dot med dot uc dot edu>]

Hello,
   If I understand the current situation with the powerpc arch
in glibc cvs, a number of programs will have to be patched to
compile with -fpic to work correctly including some of kde 2.1.1.
It appears that the stock 2.2.3 glibc release doesn't have this
problem but that the current cvs does since debian glibc 2.2.3-6
packages causes such breakage on debianppc. If the libc developers
are going to release a glibc 2.2.4 which exposes such breakage
under the glibc 2.2.4 what will be done to help identify these
problem programs? I can see a lot of confusion occuring when
users attempt to upgrade from 2.2.3 to 2.2.4 (which should be
a minor upgrade for them) and find a slew of programs no longer
function. It is most unfortunate that this problem wasn't found
at a point where we could have used versioning eliminate the problem.
Thanks in advance for any information on this as it seems like
something that will causes a lot of bandwidth to be eaten up on
the ppclinux support mailing lists once glibc 2.2.4 is released.
I think at the very least we should start a list of programs known
to be tickled by this missing -fpic problem so the maintainers can
be put on notice. With any luck the bulk of them might have minor
releases of their programs out with the proper -fpic fix in their
makefiles before glibc 2.2.4 ever is released. 
                             Jack Howarth

-- 
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Jack W. Howarth, Ph.D.                                    231 Albert Sabin Way
NMR Facility Director                              Cincinnati, Ohio 45267-0524
Dept. of Molecular Genetics                              phone: (513) 558-4420
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