[ale] Glibc machinations

[James P. Kinney III]

On Tue, 2004-10-12 at 10:12 -0400, 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.  
> Thanks for your advice,
> Dow

It must have looked at every binary on the box, or you don't have the
full story.

Just for use later, you can install multiple older libs and put them
anywhere you want them with the relocate flag in rpm. Something like:

rpm -ivh --relocate /usr/lib=/opt/lib old_crappy_glibc.0.0.1.i386.rpm

will put all the stuff normally going to /usr/lin into /opt/lib instead.

It is also possible (assuming no minor version clashes) to simply
install multiple versions of glibc normally.
> 
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