Downgrade glibc-2.3.5 --> glibc-2.3.4 How

raf · Apprentice Joined: 16 Jan 2005 Posts: 158

Hi,

I recently upgraded to glibc-2.3.5 and two of my bin-only apps fail to work. The culprits are know bugs in the glibc build which have bug reports on them, however I do not want to wait until someone gets around to fixing this. I would like to go back to glibc-2.3.4 which worked well for me.

So, we all know that gentoo warns you this will break your system, but I have seen some people on the web do it. Anyone have any ideas how this can be done? As far as I know if you downgrade your glibc your emerge will stop working and you cannot update anything.

Any thoughts?

Poe · Posted: Sat Jun 11, 2005 8:49 am Post subject:

hi. you can try

TrueDFX · Retired Dev Joined: 02 Jun 2004 Posts: 1348

That's invalid syntax, and after adding the required =, it may break your system as described in the first post. You would need to compile a base system against glibc 2.3.4 or below, transfer that system to your /, and only then downgrade glibc. I'm not sure how to do that - my previous idea (now deleted) wouldn't work right - but you could try a stage[123] in a chroot system and quikpkg'ing the base system. Or build a base system in a chroot system with emerge --buildpkg. Or download a packagecd and use the packages from that, assuming it has an older glibc.

raf · Apprentice Joined: 16 Jan 2005 Posts: 158

Well I just got an e-mail from someone who claims they have performed a 2.3.5 --> 2.3.4 downgrade and they did not experience any problems as no package requires a 2.3.5 glibc version. Well, I'm willing to give it a shot, however I want to make a backup of the relavent files in case something screwes up. Couple of questions:

1) Do I need to backup anything else execpt for /lib, /bin?
2) If everything goes wrong in the worst case scenario I'm predicting I will not have any basic commands such as cp, ls, emerge, etc. So what do I do in that case? Can I boot from a live cd chroot and re-replace all the /lib, /bin files and will that bring me back to my current 2.3.5 version?

If someone can answer these, and I brave this I'll post back my results.
-Raf

raf · Apprentice Joined: 16 Jan 2005 Posts: 158

Well I did it, I downgraded, and nothing broke. All my glibc-2.3.5 problems have gone away! I just simply masked out the 2.3.5 version and emerged glibc. Now kids, don't try this at home if you don't have to! I'm pretty sure I'm just lucky that 2.3.4 and 2.3.5 do not differ much. Otherwise I would be in some serious trouble. Linux just isn't the same without ls, cp, rm, emerge, .....

-Raf