Re: Preparing for the libc/locale upgrade

[Ludovic Courtès]

Federico Beffa <address@hidden> skribis:

> address@hidden (Ludovic Courtès) writes:
>
> [...]
>
>> Consequences for Guix on foreign distros:
>>
>>   • If the host distro provides binaries that use libc < 2.22 and 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=$HOME/.guix-profile/lib/locale would break
>>     all the distro-provided programs), or use exclusively Guix-provided
>>     programs, or use the “C” 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’d like to apply this patch in Guix in the next ‘core-updates’ 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’s handling of locale data, which was designed with single-libc
systems in mind.

Thanks,
Ludo’.