[Nix-dev] Nix inside of Red Hat Linux a.k.a. glibc 2.5 support

[Eelco Dolstra]

Hi,

Peter Simons wrote:

> the Red Hat kernel contains non-standard patches that break glibc from
> version 2.6 on insofar as that it over-estimates the kernel's
> capabilities. This phenomenon leads to unpleasant malfunctions, i.e. in
> coreutils and bash.
> 
> The only way to work around the problem appears to be to downgrade the
> installation to glibc 2.5. In Nixpkgs 0.12 this used to work fine, but
> my attempts to build stdenv-updates with glibc 2.5 were unsuccessful.

>   [...]
>   checking for unistd.h... yes
>   checking for long double... yes
>   checking size of long double... configure: error: cannot compute sizeof (long double), 77
>   See `config.log' for more details.

I had the exact same problem with glibc 2.9 after updating the bootstrap
binaries.  Not sure about the cause, but the fix was to move the "export
NIX_DONT_SET_RPATH=1" line in the glibc builder to the postConfigure phase (in
r16029).  See pkgs/development/libraries/glibc-2.9/builder.sh.  Hopefully the
same change will work for glibc 2.5.

-- 
Eelco Dolstra | http://www.st.ewi.tudelft.nl/~dolstra/