From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: ludo@gnu.org (Ludovic =?utf-8?Q?Court=C3=A8s?=) Subject: Re: Preparing for the libc/locale upgrade Date: Mon, 28 Sep 2015 22:45:34 +0200 Message-ID: <871tdi6zo1.fsf@gnu.org> References: Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8 Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable Return-path: Received: from eggs.gnu.org ([2001:4830:134:3::10]:37661) by lists.gnu.org with esmtp (Exim 4.71) (envelope-from ) id 1ZgfIr-0000We-Bn for guix-devel@gnu.org; Mon, 28 Sep 2015 16:45:42 -0400 Received: from Debian-exim by eggs.gnu.org with spam-scanned (Exim 4.71) (envelope-from ) id 1ZgfIn-00047h-SR for guix-devel@gnu.org; Mon, 28 Sep 2015 16:45:41 -0400 In-Reply-To: (Federico Beffa's message of "Mon, 28 Sep 2015 11:17:46 +0200") List-Id: "Development of GNU Guix and the GNU System distribution." List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , Errors-To: guix-devel-bounces+gcggd-guix-devel=m.gmane.org@gnu.org Sender: guix-devel-bounces+gcggd-guix-devel=m.gmane.org@gnu.org To: Federico Beffa Cc: Guix-devel Federico Beffa skribis: > ludo@gnu.org (Ludovic Court=C3=A8s) writes: > > [...] > >> Consequences for Guix on foreign distros: >> >> =E2=80=A2 If the host distro provides binaries that use libc < 2.22 an= d you >> use a mixture of Guix-provided and distro-provided programs, this is >> pretty bad. >> >> Solution: unset LOCPATH and say goodbye to locales for Guix-provided >> packages (setting LOCPATH=3D$HOME/.guix-profile/lib/locale would bre= ak >> all the distro-provided programs), or use exclusively Guix-provided >> programs, or use the =E2=80=9CC=E2=80=9D locale. > > Does this means that Guix on other distributions is no longer of > interest to the Guix project and it is essentially unsupported? No, definitely not! While suboptimal, the 3 solutions above are probably OK as a temporary measure. For the longer term, I hope we can help improve libc: https://sourceware.org/ml/libc-alpha/2015-09/msg00575.html (I=E2=80=99d like to apply this patch in Guix in the next =E2=80=98core-upd= ates=E2=80=99 cycle anyway to mitigate the problem.) > Or is this a transitory situation and an acceptable solution is being > worked on? This is transitory because sooner or later your host distro will upgrade to libc 2.22 as well. IMO Guix is not at fault; rather, it sheds light on a shortcoming of libc=E2=80=99s handling of locale data, which was designed with single-libc systems in mind. Thanks, Ludo=E2=80=99.