[ale] Glibc machinations

[Michael D. Hirsch]

On Tuesday 12 October 2004 10:12 am, Dow Hurst wrote:
> I've mentioned this before on the list but have another angle to
> attack.  I have an molecular modelling application that requires a
> particular version of glibc as far as I can tell.  If it is installed
> under SuSE8.2, SuSE9.0, RHEL3.0 it runs fine.  However, SuSE9.1 is where
> the application fails to start due to a runtime error related to glibc.
> Now, this problem will probably go away if we can afford to upgrade the
> application to the latest version, but that is expensive.  I'd like to
> know how I can install the older glibc rpm from SuSE9.0 without breaking
> the SuSE9.1 install.  My reason for this is that one user had SuSE8.2
> installed and did an upgrade to SuSE9.1.  The upgrade process told her a
> particular rpm shouldn't be upgraded because this modelling app (not an
> rpm) depended on it.  She chose to not upgrade that rpm (she didn't
> capture that info for me) and the upgrade continued.  She was completely
> happy with 9.1 but had this modelling app running.  I need to figure
> what happened and see if I can duplicate it.  Any ideas how the upgrade
> process figured out what rpm couldn't be upgraded?  The modelling
> application has it's own installer that doesn't interact with rpm at all
> during installation of the app.  Somehow the upgrader in SuSE9.1 looked
> at all the binaries on the system and determined what was needed.

I'm impressed.  It sounds like maybe the SuSE upgrade did an "ldd /usr/bin/*" 
to find out what versions of libraries were required.  I can't think of how 
else it could determine that, since you say that the app doesn't install with 
rpm.

You might try just installing both versions of glibc.  rpm -ivh 
glibc-old-version.rpm where of course you replace that with the proper name.  
Properly written libraries should be able to co-exist.

I'm not sure how yast does things, but with apt there is a config file where 
you can say that certain packages are allowed to be duplicated.  yast may 
need something similar.

Michael